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Making an accurate classifier ensemble by voting on classifications from imputed learning sets

Full Text: 06_Su.pdf PDF

Ensemble methods often produce effective classifiers by learning a set of base classifiers from a diverse collection of the training sets. In this paper, we present a system, voting on classifications from imputed learning sets (VCI), that produces those diverse training sets by randomly removing a small percentage of attribute values from the original training set, and then using an imputation technique to replace those values. VCI then runs a learning algorithm on each of these imputed training sets to produce a set of base classifiers. Later, the final prediction on a novel instance is the plurality classification produced by these classifiers. We investigate various imputation techniques here, including the state-of-the-art Bayesian multiple imputation (BMI) and expectation maximisation (EM). Our empirical results show that VCI predictors, especially those using BMI and EM as imputers, significantly improve the classification accuracy over conventional classifiers, especially on datasets that are originally incomplete; moreover VCI significantly outperforms bagging predictors and imputation-helped machine learners.

Citation

X. Su, T. Khoshgoftaar, R. Greiner. "Making an accurate classifier ensemble by voting on classifications from imputed learning sets". International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, (ed: Dr. Reda Alhajj and Dr. Kang Zhang), 1(3), pp 301-322, June 2009.

Keywords: machine learned classifiers, imputation techniques, incomplete data, ensemble classifiers, machine learning
Category: In Journal

BibTeX

@article{Su+al:IJIDS09,
  author = {Xiaoyuan Su and Taghi Khoshgoftaar and Russ Greiner},
  title = {Making an accurate classifier ensemble by voting on classifications
    from imputed learning sets},
  Editor = {Dr. Reda Alhajj and Dr. Kang Zhang},
  Volume = "1",
  Number = "3",
  Pages = {301-322},
  journal = {International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences},
  year = 2009,
}

Last Updated: October 14, 2009
Submitted by Justin Fagnan

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