Ensemble based on GA wrapper feature selection

Ensemble of classifiers is a learning paradigm where many classifiers are jointly used to solve a problem. Research has shown that ensemble is very effective for classification tasks. Diversity and accuracy are two basic requirements for the ensemble creation. In this paper, we propose an ensemble creation method based on GA wrapper feature selection. Preliminary experimental results on real-world data show that the proposed method is promising, especially when the number of training data is limited.     

A variant of Rotation Forest for constructing ensemble classifiers

Rotation Forest, an effective ensemble classifier generation technique, works by using principal component analysis (PCA) to rotate the original feature axes so that different training sets for learning base classifiers can be formed. This paper presents a variant of Rotation Forest, which can be viewed as a combination of Bagging and Rotation Forest. Bagging is used here to inject more randomness into Rotation Forest in order to increase the diversity among the ensemble membership. The experiments conducted with 33 benchmark classification data sets available from the UCI repository, among which a classification tree is adopted as the base learning algorithm, demonstrate that the proposed method generally produces ensemble classifiers with lower error than Bagging, AdaBoost and Rotation Forest. The bias–variance analysis of error performance shows that the proposed method improves the prediction error of a single classifier by reducing much more variance term than the other considered ensemble procedures. Furthermore, the results computed on the data sets with artificial classification noise indicate that the new method is more robust to noise and kappa-error diagrams are employed to investigate the diversity–accuracy patterns of the ensemble classifiers.     

Attribute bagging: improving accuracy of classifier ensembles by using random feature subsets

We present attribute bagging (AB), a technique for improving the accuracy and stability of classifier ensembles induced using random subsets of features. AB is a wrapper method that can be used with any learning algorithm. It establishes an appropriate attribute subset size and then randomly selects subsets of features, creating projections of the training set on which the ensemble classifiers are built. The induced classifiers are then used for voting. This article compares the performance of our AB method with bagging and other algorithms on a hand-pose recognition dataset. It is shown that AB gives consistently better results than bagging, both in accuracy and stability. The performance of ensemble voting in bagging and the AB method as a function of the attribute subset size and the number of voters for both weighted and unweighted voting is tested and discussed. We also demonstrate that ranking the attribute subsets by their classification accuracy and voting using only the best subsets further improves the resulting performance of the ensemble.     

Feature selection for ensembles applied to handwriting recognition

Feature selection for ensembles has shown to be an effective strategy for ensemble creation due to its ability of producing good subsets of features, which make the classifiers of the ensemble disagree on difficult cases. In this paper we present an ensemble feature selection approach based on a hierarchical multi-objective genetic algorithm. The underpinning paradigm is the “overproduce and choose”. The algorithm operates in two levels. Firstly, it performs feature selection in order to generate a set of classifiers and then it chooses the best team of classifiers. In order to show its robustness, the method is evaluated in two different contexts:supervised and unsupervised feature selection. In the former, we have considered the problem of handwritten digit recognition and used three different feature sets and multi-layer perceptron neural networks as classifiers. In the latter, we took into account the problem of handwritten month word recognition and used three different feature sets and hidden Markov models as classifiers. Experiments and comparisons with classical methods, such as Bagging and Boosting, demonstrated that the proposed methodology brings compelling improvements when classifiers have to work with very low error rates. Comparisons have been done by considering the recognition rates only.     

Classification as clustering: a Pareto cooperative-competitive GP approach

Intuitively population based algorithms such as genetic programming provide a natural environment for supporting solutions that learn to decompose the overall task between multiple individuals, or a team. This work presents a framework for evolving teams without recourse to prespecifying the number of cooperating individuals. To do so, each individual evolves a mapping to a distribution of outcomes that, following clustering, establishes the parameterization of a (Gaussian) local membership function. This gives individuals the opportunity to represent subsets of tasks, where the overall task is that of classification under the supervised learning domain. Thus, rather than each team member representing an entire class, individuals are free to identify unique subsets of the overall classification task. The framework is supported by techniques from evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) and Pareto competitive coevolution. EMO establishes the basis for encouraging individuals to provide accurate yet nonoverlaping behaviors; whereas competitive coevolution provides the mechanism for scaling to potentially large unbalanced datasets. Benchmarking is performed against recent examples of nonlinear SVM classifiers over 12 UCI datasets with between 150 and 200,000 training instances. Solutions from the proposed coevolutionary multiobjective GP framework appear to provide a good balance between classification performance and model complexity, especially as the dataset instance count increases.     

Ensemble feature selection with the simple Bayesian classification

A popular method for creating an accurate classifier from a set of training data is to build several classifiers, and then to combine their predictions. The ensembles of simple Bayesian classifiers have traditionally not been a focus of research. One way to generate an ensemble of accurate and diverse simple Bayesian classifiers is to use different feature subsets generated with the random subspace method. In this case, the ensemble consists of multiple classifiers constructed by randomly selecting feature subsets, that is, classifiers constructed in randomly chosen subspaces. In this paper, we present an algorithm for building ensembles of simple Bayesian classifiers in random subspaces. The EFS_SBC algorithm includes a hill-climbing-based refinement cycle, which tries to improve the accuracy and diversity of the base classifiers built on random feature subsets. We conduct a number of experiments on a collection of 21 real-world and synthetic data sets, comparing the EFS_SBC ensembles with the single simple Bayes, and with the boosted simple Bayes. In many cases the EFS_SBC ensembles have higher accuracy than the single simple Bayesian classifier, and than the boosted Bayesian ensemble. We find that the ensembles produced focusing on diversity have lower generalization error, and that the degree of importance of diversity in building the ensembles is different for different data sets. We propose several methods for the integration of simple Bayesian classifiers in the ensembles. In a number of cases the techniques for dynamic integration of classifiers have significantly better classification accuracy than their simple static analogues. We suggest that a reason for that is that the dynamic integration better utilizes the ensemble coverage than the static integration.     

Semi-supervised classification based on random subspace dimensionality reduction

Graph structure is vital to graph based semi-supervised learning. However, the problem of constructing a graph that reflects the underlying data distribution has been seldom investigated in semi-supervised learning, especially for high dimensional data. In this paper, we focus on graph construction for semi-supervised learning and propose a novel method called Semi-Supervised Classification based on Random Subspace Dimensionality Reduction, SSC-RSDR in short. Different from traditional methods that perform graph-based dimensionality reduction and classification in the original space, SSC-RSDR performs these tasks in subspaces. More specifically, SSC-RSDR generates several random subspaces of the original space and applies graph-based semi-supervised dimensionality reduction in these random subspaces. It then constructs graphs in these processed random subspaces and trains semi-supervised classifiers on the graphs. Finally, it combines the resulting base classifiers into an ensemble classifier. Experimental results on face recognition tasks demonstrate that SSC-RSDR not only has superior recognition performance with respect to competitive methods, but also is robust against a wide range of values of input parameters.     

EROS: Ensemble rough subspaces

Ensemble learning is attracting much attention from pattern recognition and machine learning domains for good generalization. Both theoretical and experimental researches show that combining a set of accurate and diverse classifiers will lead to a powerful classification system. An algorithm, called FS-PP-EROS, for selective ensemble of rough subspaces is proposed in this paper. Rough set-based attribute reduction is introduced to generate a set of reducts, and then each reduct is used to train a base classifier. We introduce an accuracy-guided forward search and post-pruning strategy to select part of the base classifiers for constructing an efficient and effective ensemble system. The experiments show that classification accuracies of ensemble systems with accuracy-guided forward search strategy will increase at first, arrive at a maximal value, then decrease in sequentially adding the base classifiers. We delete the base classifiers added after the maximal accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed ensemble systems outperform bagging and random subspace methods in terms of accuracy and size of ensemble systems. FS-PP-EROS can keep or improve the classification accuracy with very few base classifiers, which leads to a powerful and compact classification system.     

Linear-time wrappers to identify atypical points: two subset generation methods

The wrapper approach to identify atypical examples can be preferable to the filter approach (which may not be consistent with the classifier in use), but its running time is prohibitive. The fastest available wrappers are quadratic in the number of examples, which is far too expensive for atypical detection. The algorithm presented in this paper is a linear-time wrapper that is roughly 75 times faster than the quadratic wrappers on average over 7 classifiers and 20 data sets tested in this research. Also, two subset generation, methods for the wrapper are introduced and compared. Atypical points are defined in this paper as the misclassified points that the proposed algorithm (Atypical Sequential Removing: ASR) finds not useful to the classification task. They may include outliers as well as overlapping samples. ASR can identify and rank atypical points in the whole data set without damaging the prediction accuracy. It is general enough that classifiers without reject option can use it. Experiments on benchmark data sets and different classifiers show promising results and confirm that this wrapper method has some advantages and can be used for atypical detection.     

Performance of feature-selection methods in the classification of high-dimension data

Contemporary biological technologies produce extremely high-dimensional data sets from which to design classifiers, with 20,000 or more potential features being common place. In addition, sample sizes tend to be small. In such settings, feature selection is an inevitable part of classifier design. Heretofore, there have been a number of comparative studies for feature selection, but they have either considered settings with much smaller dimensionality than those occurring in current bioinformatics applications or constrained their study to a few real data sets. This study compares some basic feature-selection methods in settings involving thousands of features, using both model-based synthetic data and real data. It defines distribution models involving different numbers of markers (useful features) versus non-markers (useless features) and different kinds of relations among the features. Under this framework, it evaluates the performances of feature-selection algorithms for different distribution models and classifiers. Both classification error and the number of discovered markers are computed. Although the results clearly show that none of the considered feature-selection methods performs best across all scenarios, there are some general trends relative to sample size and relations among the features. For instance, the classifier-independent univariate filter methods have similar trends. Filter methods such as the t-test have better or similar performance with wrapper methods for harder problems. This improved performance is usually accompanied with significant peaking. Wrapper methods have better performance when the sample size is sufficiently large. ReliefF, the classifier-independent multivariate filter method, has worse performance than univariate filter methods in most cases; however, ReliefF-based wrapper methods show performance similar to their t-test-based counterparts.     

基于遗传规划集成学习的网络作弊检测

网络作弊检测是搜索引擎的重要挑战之一,该文提出基于遗传规划的集成学习方法 (简记为GPENL)来检测网络作弊。该方法首先通过欠抽样技术从原训练集中抽样得到t个不同的训练集;然后使用c个不同的分类算法对t个训练集进行训练得到t*c个基分类器;最后利用遗传规划得到t*c个基分类器的集成方式。新方法不仅将欠抽样技术和集成学习融合起来提高非平衡数据集的分类性能,还能方便地集成不同类型的基分类器。在WEBSPAM-UK2006数据集上所做的实验表明无论是同态集成还是异态集成,GPENL均能提高分类的性能,且异态集成比同态集成更加有效;GPENL比AdaBoost、Bagging、RandomForest、多数投票集成、EDKC算法和基于Prediction Spamicity的方法取得更高的F-度量值。     

基于相关随机子空间的分类数据聚类集成

为了提升分类数据聚类集成的效果,提出了一种新的相关随机子空间聚类集成模型。该模型利用粗糙集理论将分类属性分解成相关和不相关子集,在相关属性子集上随机生成多个相关子空间并对分类数据进行聚类,通过集成多个较优且具差异性的聚类结果以获得最终的聚类划分。此外,将粗糙集约简概念应用于相关子空间属性数目的确定,有效地避免了参数对聚类结果的影响。UCI数据集实验表明,新模型的性能优于其他已有模型,说明了其有效性。     

Feature selection in single and ensemble learning‐based bankruptcy prediction models

Feature selection is an important data preprocessing step for the construction of an effective bankruptcy prediction model. The prediction performance can be affected by the employed feature selection and classification techniques. However, there have been very few studies of bankruptcy prediction that identify the best combination of feature selection and classification techniques. In this study, two types of feature selection methods, including filter‐ and wrapper‐based methods, are considered, and two types of classification techniques, including statistical and machine learning techniques, are employed in the development of the prediction methods. In addition, bagging and boosting ensemble classifiers are also constructed for comparison. The experimental results based on three related datasets that contain different numbers of input features show that the genetic algorithm as the wrapper‐based feature selection method performs better than the filter‐based one by information gain. It is also shown that the lowest prediction error rates for the three datasets are provided by combining the genetic algorithm with the naïve Bayes and support vector machine classifiers without bagging and boosting.     

基于粗糙集理论的协同训练算法

为了提升风险决策环境下协同训练的效果, 提出了一种基于粗糙子空间的协同决策算法。首先利用粗糙集属性约简的概念, 将部分标记数据属性空间分解为两差异性较大的粗糙子空间; 在各子空间上训练分类器, 并依据各分类器决策风险代价及隶属度将无标记数据划分为可信、噪声和待定样本。综合两分类器的分类结果, 标注少量可信无标记样本后重复协同训练。从理论上分析了算法性能提升的区间界, 并在UCI数据集上进行实验, 验证了模型的有效性及效率。     

集合模拟可视化进展

近年来,集合模拟被频繁地运用于气候、数学、物理等领域。集合模拟数据通常具有多值、多变量、时变的属性,再加上其庞大的数据量,对这类数据的分析充满着挑战。集合模拟数据可视化,是通过视觉和人机交互的手段,向领域专家揭示集合模拟数据中的成员差异和整体概况,从而帮助专家探索、总结、和验证科学发现。本文从比较个体成员和概括整体成员这两个不同分析任务,以及基于位置和基于特征这两种分析策略的角度,系统地分析了具有代表性的集合模拟可视化工作,收集整理了各类方法的可视化形式、交互技术、应用案例。文章通过总结近年集合模拟可视化方法来讨论现有研究的趋势,以及对未来研究进行进一步的展望。     

Ensembles of jittered association rule classifiers

The ensembling of classifiers tends to improve predictive accuracy. To obtain an ensemble with N classifiers, one typically needs to run N learning processes. In this paper we introduce and explore Model Jittering Ensembling, where one single model is perturbed in order to obtain variants that can be used as an ensemble. We use as base classifiers sets of classification association rules. The two methods of jittering ensembling we propose are Iterative Reordering Ensembling (IRE) and Post Bagging (PB). Both methods start by learning one rule set over a single run, and then produce multiple rule sets without relearning. Empirical results on 36 data sets are positive and show that both strategies tend to reduce error with respect to the single model association rule classifier. A bias–variance analysis reveals that while both IRE and PB are able to reduce the variance component of the error, IRE is particularly effective in reducing the bias component. We show that Model Jittering Ensembling can represent a very good speed-up w.r.t. multiple model learning ensembling. We also compare Model Jittering with various state of the art classifiers in terms of predictive accuracy and computational efficiency.     

基于约束投影的支持向量机选择性集成

提出两种基于约束投影的支持向量机选择性集成算法。首先利用随机选取的must-link和cannot-link成对约束集确定投影矩阵,将原始训练样本投影到不同的低维空间训练一组基分类器;然后,分别采用遗传优化和最小化偏离度误差两种选择性集成技术对基分类器进行组合。基于UCI数据的实验表明,提出的两种集成算法均能有效提高支持向量机的泛化性能,显著优于Bagging,Boosting,特征Bagging及LoBag等集成算法。     

集成学习算法在中医证型分类预测中的应用

为提高中医诊断的智能化以及辩证的准确度,提出一种基于多模态扰动策略的集成学习算法(MPEL算法)。首先,在样本域多次抽样产生不同的样本子空间;其次,在属性域采用改进的层次聚类特征选择算法,划分不同的属性子空间,进而训练出具有较大差异性的基分类器;然后,采用贪心策略选取最优的基分类器组合,提高算法整体性能。选择中医哮喘病症状-证型病案进行验证,并与其它集成学习算法对比,实验结果表明,改进的集成学习算法在哮喘病症状-证型分类预测中训练速度较快、识别准确率更高,最高识别率高达98.16%。     

Fast wrapper feature subset selection in high-dimensional datasets by means of filter re-ranking

This paper deals with the problem of supervised wrapper-based feature subset selection in datasets with a very large number of attributes. Recently the literature has contained numerous references to the use of hybrid selection algorithms: based on a filter ranking, they perform an incremental wrapper selection over that ranking. Though working fine, these methods still have their problems: (1) depending on the complexity of the wrapper search method, the number of wrapper evaluations can still be too large; and (2) they rely on a univariate ranking that does not take into account interaction between the variables already included in the selected subset and the remaining ones.Here we propose a new approach whose main goal is to drastically reduce the number of wrapper evaluations while maintaining good performance (e.g. accuracy and size of the obtained subset). To do this we propose an algorithm that iteratively alternates between filter ranking construction and wrapper feature subset selection (FSS). Thus, the FSS only uses the first block of ranked attributes and the ranking method uses the current selected subset in order to build a new ranking where this knowledge is considered. The algorithm terminates when no new attribute is selected in the last call to the FSS algorithm. The main advantage of this approach is that only a few blocks of variables are analyzed, and so the number of wrapper evaluations decreases drastically.The proposed method is tested over eleven high-dimensional datasets (2400-46,000 variables) using different classifiers. The results show an impressive reduction in the number of wrapper evaluations without degrading the quality of the obtained subset.     

Simplification of genetic programs: a literature survey

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - Genetic programming (GP), a widely used evolutionary computing technique, suffers from bloat—the problem of excessive growth in individuals’ sizes....