一种基于几何关系的多分类器差异性度量及其在多分类器系统构造中的应用

多分类器系统是应对复杂模式识别问题的有效手段之一. 当子分类器之间存在差异性或互补性时,多分类器系统往往能够获得比单分类器更高的分类正确率. 因而差异性度量在多分类器系统设计中至关重要. 目前已有的差异性度量方法虽能够在一定程度上刻画分类器之间的差异,但在应用中可能出现诸如差异性淹没等问题. 本文提出了一种基于几何关系的多分类器差异性度量,并在此基础上提出了一种多分类器系统构造方法,同时通过实验对比了使用新差异性度量方法和传统方法对多分类器系统融合分类正确率的影响. 结果表明,本文所提出的差异性度量能够很好地刻画分类器之间的差异,能从很大程度上抑制差异性淹没问题,并能有效应用于多分类器系统构造.     

Accuracy/Diversity and Ensemble MLP Classifier Design

The difficulties of tuning parameters of multilayer perceptrons (MLP) classifiers are well known. In this paper, a measure is described that is capable of predicting the number of classifier training epochs for achieving optimal performance in an ensemble of MLP classifiers. The measure is computed between pairs of patterns on the training data and is based on a spectral representation of a Boolean function. This representation characterizes the mapping from classifier decisions to target label and allows accuracy and diversity to be incorporated within a single measure. Results on many benchmark problems, including the Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) face database demonstrate that the measure is well correlated with base-classifier test error, and may be used to predict the optimal number of training epochs. While correlation with ensemble test error is not quite as strong, it is shown in this paper that the measure may be used to predict number of epochs for optimal ensemble performance. Although the technique is only applicable to two-class problems, it is extended here to multiclass through output coding. For the output-coding technique, a random code matrix is shown to give better performance than one-per-class code, even when the base classifier is well-tuned.     

Vote counting measures for ensemble classifiers

Various measures, such as Margin and Bias/Variance, have been proposed with the aim of gaining a better understanding of why Multiple Classifier Systems (MCS) perform as well as they do. While these measures provide different perspectives for MCS analysis, it is not clear how to use them for MCS design. In this paper a different measure based on a spectral representation is proposed for two-class problems. It incorporates terms representing positive and negative correlation of pairs of training patterns with respect to class labels. Experiments employing MLP base classifiers, in which parameters are fixed but systematically varied, demonstrate the sensitivity of the proposed measure to base classifier complexity.     

基于概率校准的集成学习

针对原有集成学习多样性不足而导致的集成效果不够显著的问题,提出一种基于概率校准的集成学习方法以及两种降低多重共线性影响的方法。首先,通过使用不同的概率校准方法对原始分类器给出的概率进行校准;然后使用前一步生成的若干校准后的概率进行学习,从而预测最终结果。第一步中使用的不同概率校准方法为第二步的集成学习提供了更强的多样性。接下来,针对校准概率与原始概率之间的多重共线性问题,提出了选择最优(choose-best)和有放回抽样(bootstrap)的方法。选择最优方法对每个基分类器,从原始分类器和若干校准分类器之间选择最优的进行集成;有放回抽样方法则从整个基分类器集合中进行有放回的抽样,然后对抽样出来的分类器进行集成。实验表明,简单的概率校准集成学习对学习效果的提高有限,而使用了选择最优和有放回抽样方法后,学习效果得到了较大的提高。此结果说明,概率校准为集成学习提供了更强的多样性,其伴随的多重共线性问题可以通过抽样等方法有效地解决。     

Diversity-based combination of non-parametric classifiers for EMG signal decomposition

Non-parametric classification procedures based on a certainty measure and nearest neighbour rule for motor unit potential classification (MUP) during electromyographic (EMG) signal decomposition were explored. A diversity-based classifier fusion approach is developed and evaluated to achieve improved classification performance. The developed system allows the construction of a set of non-parametric base classifiers and then automatically chooses, from the pool of base classifiers, subsets of classifiers to form candidate classifier ensembles. The system selects the classifier ensemble members by exploiting a diversity measure for selecting classifier teams. The kappa statistic is used as the diversity measure to estimate the level of agreement between base classifier outputs, i.e., to measure the degree of decision similarity between base classifiers. The pool of base classifiers consists of two kinds of classifiers: adaptive certainty-based classifiers (ACCs) and adaptive fuzzy k-NN classifiers (AFNNCs) and both utilize different types of features. Once the patterns are assigned to their classes, by the classifier fusion system, firing pattern consistency statistics for each class are calculated to detect classification errors in an adaptive fashion. Performance of the developed system was evaluated using real and simulated EMG signals and was compared with the performance of the constituent base classifiers and the performance of the fixed ensemble containing the full set of base classifiers. Across the EMG signal data sets used, the diversity-based classifier fusion approach had better average classification performance overall, especially in terms of reducing classification errors.     

多分类器选择集成方法

针对目前人们对分类性能的高要求和多分类器集成实现的复杂性,从基分类器准确率和基分类器间差异性两方面出发,提出了一种新的多分类器选择集成算法。该算法首先从生成的基分类器中选择出分类准确率较高的,然后利用分类器差异性度量来选择差异性大的高性能基分类器,在分类器集成之前先对分类器集进行选择获得新的分类器集。在UCI数据库上的实验结果证明,该方法优于bagging方法,取得了很好的分类识别效果。     

基于基分类器系数和多样性的改进AdaBoost算法

针对传统AdaBoost算法的基分类器线性组合效率低以及过适应的问题,提出了一种基于基分类器系数与多样性的改进算法——WD AdaBoost。首先,根据基分类器的错误率与样本权重的分布状态,给出新的基分类器系数求解方法,以提高基分类器的组合效率;其次,在基分类器的选择策略上,WD AdaBoost算法引入双误度量以增加基分类器间的多样性。在五个来自不同实际应用领域的数据集上,与传统AdaBoost算法相比,CeffAda算法使用新的基分类器系数求解方法使测试误差平均降低了1.2个百分点;同时,WD AdaBoost算法与WLDF_Ada、AD_Ada、sk_AdaBoost等算法相对比,具有更低的错误率。实验结果表明,WD AdaBoost算法能够更高效地集成基分类器,抵抗过拟合,并可以提高分类性能。     

基于差异性和准确性的加权调和平均度量的 基因表达数据选择性集成算法

基分类器之间的差异性和单个基分类器自身的准确性是影响集成系统泛化性能的两个重要因素,针对差异性和准确性难以平衡的问题,提出了一种基于差异性和准确性的加权调和平均（D-A-WHA）度量基因表达数据的选择性集成算法。以核超限学习机（KELM）作为基分类器,通过D-A-WHA度量调节基分类器之间的差异性和准确性,最后选择一组准确性较高并且与其他基分类器差异性较大的基分类器组合进行集成。通过在UCI基因数据集上进行仿真实验,实验结果表明,与传统的Bagging、Adaboost等集成算法相比,基于D-A-WHA度量的选择性集成算法分类精度和稳定性都有显著的提高,且能有效应用于癌症基因数据的分类中。     

An analysis of diversity measures

Diversity among the base classifiers is deemed to be important when constructing a classifier ensemble. Numerous algorithms have been proposed to construct a good classifier ensemble by seeking both the accuracy of the base classifiers and the diversity among them. However, there is no generally accepted definition of diversity, and measuring the diversity explicitly is very difficult. Although researchers have designed several experimental studies to compare different diversity measures, usually confusing results were observed. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis on six existing diversity measures (namely disagreement measure, double fault measure, KW variance, inter-rater agreement, generalized diversity and measure of difficulty), show underlying relationships between them, and relate them to the concept of margin, which is more explicitly related to the success of ensemble learning algorithms. We illustrate why confusing experimental results were observed and show that the discussed diversity measures are naturally ineffective. Our analysis provides a deeper understanding of the concept of diversity, and hence can help design better ensemble learning algorithms. Editor: Tom Fawcett     

The effects of combining classifiers with the same training statistics using Bayesian decision rules

Multiple classifier systems (MCS) are attracting increasing interest in the field of pattern recognition and machine learning. Recently, MCS are also being introduced in the remote sensing field where the importance of classifier diversity for image classification problems has not been examined. In this article, Satellite Pour l'Observation de la Terre (SPOT) IV panchromatic and multispectral satellite images are classified into six land cover classes using five base classifiers: contextual classifier, k-nearest neighbour classifier, Mahalanobis classifier, maximum likelihood classifier and minimum distance classifier. The five base classifiers are trained with the same feature sets throughout the experiments and a posteriori probability, derived from the confusion matrix of these base classifiers, is applied to five Bayesian decision rules (product rule, sum rule, maximum rule, minimum rule and median rule) for constructing different combinations of classifier ensembles. The performance of these classifier ensembles is evaluated for overall accuracy and kappa statistics. Three statistical tests, the McNemar's test, the Cochran's Q test and the Looney's F-test, are used to examine the diversity of the classification results of the base classifiers compared to the results of the classifier ensembles. The experimental comparison reveals that (a) significant diversity amongst the base classifiers cannot enhance the performance of classifier ensembles; (b) accuracy improvement of classifier ensembles can only be found by using base classifiers with similar and low accuracy; (c) increasing the number of base classifiers cannot improve the overall accuracy of the MCS and (d) none of the Bayesian decision rules outperforms the others.     

Making Diversity Enhancement Based on Multiple Classifier System by Weight Tuning

This article presents a new method to construct multiple classifier system by making diverse base classifiers using weight tuning. In the method presented, base classifiers are multilayer perceptions which creates diverse base classifiers using a three-step procedure. In the first step, base classifiers are trained for acceptable accuracy. In the second step, a weight tuning process tunes their weights such that each one can distinguish one class of input data from the others with highest possible accuracy. An evolutionary method is used to optimize efficiency of each base classifier to distinguish one class of input data in this step. In the third step, a new method combines the results of the base classifiers. As diversity is measured and monitored throughout the entire procedure, it is measured using a confusion matrix. Superiority of the proposed method is discussed using several known classifier fusion methods and known benchmark datasets.     

一种新的基于多样性赋权证据推理的集成学习方法

在集成学习中使用平均法、投票法作为结合策略无法充分利用基分类器的有效信息,且根据波动性设置基分类器的权重不精确、不恰当。以上问题会降低集成学习的效果,为了进一步提高集成学习的性能,提出将证据推理(evidence reasoning, ER)规则作为结合策略,并使用多样性赋权法设置基分类器的权重。首先,由多个深度学习模型作为基分类器、ER规则作为结合策略,构建集成学习的基本结构;然后,通过多样性度量方法计算每个基分类器相对于其他基分类器的差异性;最后,将差异性归一化实现基分类器的权重设置。通过多个图像数据集的分类实验,结果表明提出的方法较实验选取的其他方法准确率更高且更稳定,证明了该方法可以充分利用基分类器的有效信息,且多样性赋权法更精确。     

Controlling the diversity in classifier ensembles through a measure of agreement

In this paper, a simulation method is proposed to generate a set of classifier outputs with specified individual accuracies and fixed pairwise agreement. A diversity measure (kappa) is used to control the agreement among classifiers for building the classifier teams. The generated team outputs can be used to study the behaviour of class-type combination methods such as voting rules over multiple dependent classifiers.     

Maximum relevancy maximum complementary based ordered aggregation for ensemble pruning

Ensemble methods have delivered exceptional performance in various applications. However, this exceptional performance is achieved at the expense of heavy storage requirements and slower predictions. Ensemble pruning aims at reducing the complexity of this popular learning paradigm without worsening its performance. This paper presents an efficient and effective ordering-based ensemble pruning methods which ranks all the base classifiers with respect to a maximum relevancy maximum complementary (MRMC) measure. The MRMC measure evaluates the base classifier’s classification ability as well as its complementariness to the ensemble, and thereby a set of accurate and complementary base classifiers can be selected. Moreover, an evaluation function that deliberately favors the candidate sub-ensembles with a better performance in classifying low margin instances has also been proposed. Experiments performed on 25 benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.     

Ensemble classification based on supervised clustering for credit scoring

Credit scoring aims to assess the risk associated with lending to individual consumers. Recently, ensemble classification methodology has become popular in this field. However, most researches utilize random sampling to generate training subsets for constructing the base classifiers. Therefore, their diversity is not guaranteed, which may lead to a degradation of overall classification performance. In this paper, we propose an ensemble classification approach based on supervised clustering for credit scoring. In the proposed approach, supervised clustering is employed to partition the data samples of each class into a number of clusters. Clusters from different classes are then pairwise combined to form a number of training subsets. In each training subset, a specific base classifier is constructed. For a sample whose class label needs to be predicted, the outputs of these base classifiers are combined by weighted voting. The weight associated with a base classifier is determined by its classification performance in the neighborhood of the sample. In the experimental study, two benchmark credit data sets are adopted for performance evaluation, and an industrial case study is conducted. The results show that compared to other ensemble classification methods, the proposed approach is able to generate base classifiers with higher diversity and local accuracy, and improve the accuracy of credit scoring.     

Ensemble Online Classifier Based on the One-Class Base Classifiers for Mining Data Streams

The problem addressed in this study concerns mining data streams with concept drift. The goal of the article is to propose and validate a new approach to mining data streams with concept-drift using the ensemble classifier constructed from the one-class base classifiers. It is assumed that base classifiers of the proposed ensemble are induced from incoming chunks of the data stream. Each chunk consists of prototypes and information about whether the class prediction of these instances, carried-out at earlier steps, has been correct. Each data chunk can be updated by using the instance selection technique when new data arrive. When a new data chunk is formed, the ensemble model is also updated on the basis of weights assigned to each one-class classifier. In this article, two well-known instance-based learning algorithms—the CNN and the ENN—have been adopted to solve the one-class classification problems and, consequently, update the proposed classifier ensemble. The proposed approaches have been validated experimentally, and the computational experiment results are shown and discussed. The experiment results prove that the proposed approach using the ensemble classifier constructed from the one-class base classifiers with instance selection for chunk updating can outperform well-known approaches for data streams with concept drift.     

A fuzzy classifier to deal with similarity between labels on automatic prosodic labeling

This paper presents an original approach to automatic prosodic labeling. Fuzzy logic techniques are used for representing situations of high uncertainty with respect to the category to be assigned to a given prosodic unit. The Fuzzy Integer technique is used to combine the output of different base classifiers. The resulting fuzzy classifier benefits from the different capabilities of the base classifiers for identifying different types of prosodic events. At the same time, the fuzzy classifier identifies the events that are potentially more difficult to be labeled. The classifier has been applied to the identification of ToBI pitch accents. The state of the art on pitch accent multiclass classification reports around 70% accuracy rate. In this paper we describe a fuzzy classifier which assigns more than one label in confusing situations. We show that the pairs of labels that appear in these uncertain situations are consistent with the most confused pairs of labels reported in manual prosodic labeling experiments. Our fuzzy classifier obtains a soft classification rate of 81.8%, which supports the potential of the proposed system for computer assisted prosodic labeling.     

Using diversity of errors for selecting members of a committee classifier

Diversity of classifiers is generally accepted as being necessary for combining them in a committee. Quantifying diversity of classifiers, however, is difficult as there is no formal definition thereof. Numerous measures have been proposed in literature, but their performance is often know to be suboptimal. Here several common methods are compared with a novel approach focusing on the diversity of the errors made by the member classifiers. Experiments with combining classifiers for handwritten character recognition are presented. The results show that the approach of diversity of errors is beneficial, and that the novel exponential error count measure is capable of consistently finding an effective member classifier set.     

基于投票信息熵的AdaBoost改进算法

针对AdaBoost算法不能有效提升NB(Naive Bayesian)的分类性能,提出一种改进的样本权重维护策略.权重的调整不仅依据样本是否分错,还需考虑前几轮的多个基分类器对它的投票分歧.基分类器的信任度不但与错误率有关,还与基分类器间的差异性有关.这样可以提高基分类器的正确性,增加基分类器的差异性.实验结果表明,改进的BoostVE-NB算法能有效地提升NB文本分类性能.     

Feature-based classifier ensembles for diagnosing multiple faults in rotating machinery

Recent researches in fault classification have shown the importance of accurately selecting the features that have to be used as inputs to the diagnostic model. In this work, a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is considered for the feature selection phase. Then, two different techniques for using the selected features to develop the fault classification model are compared: a single classifier based on the feature subset with the best classification performance and an ensemble of classifiers working on different feature subsets. The motivation for developing ensembles of classifiers is that they can achieve higher accuracies than single classifiers. An important issue for an ensemble to be effective is the diversity in the predictions of the base classifiers which constitute it, i.e. their capability of erring on different sub-regions of the pattern space. In order to show the benefits of having diverse base classifiers in the ensemble, two different ensembles have been developed: in the first, the base classifiers are constructed on feature subsets found by MOGAs aimed at maximizing the fault classification performance and at minimizing the number of features of the subsets; in the second, diversity among classifiers is added to the MOGA search as the third objective function to maximize. In both cases, a voting technique is used to effectively combine the predictions of the base classifiers to construct the ensemble output. For verification, some numerical experiments are conducted on a case of multiple-fault classification in rotating machinery and the results achieved by the two ensembles are compared with those obtained by a single optimal classifier.