Unsupervised ensemble classification with correlated decision agents

Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Decision-making procedures when a set of individual binary labels is processed to produce a unique joint decision can be approached modeling the individual labels as multivariate independent Bernoulli random variables. This probabilistic model allows an unsupervised solution using EM-based algorithms, which basically estimate the distribution model parameters and take a joint decision using a Maximum a Posteriori criterion. These methods usually assume that individual decision agents are conditionally independent, an assumption that might not hold in practical setups. Therefore, in this work we formulate and solve the decision-making problem using an EM-based approach but assuming correlated decision agents. Improved performance is obtained on synthetic and real datasets, compared to classical and state-of-the-art algorithms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft