Evolutionary Learning proceeds by evolving a population of classifiers, from which it generally returns (with some notable exceptions) the single best-of-run classifier as final result. In the meanwhile, Ensemble Learning, one of the most efficient approaches in supervised Machine Learning for the last decade, proceeds by building a population of diverse classifiers. Ensemble Learning with Evolutionary Computation thus receives increasing attention. The Evolutionary Ensemble Learning (EEL) approach presented in this paper features two contributions. First, a new fitness function, inspired by co-evolution and enforcing the classifier diversity, is presented. Further, a new selection criterion based on the classification margin is proposed. This criterion is used to extract the classifier ensemble from the final population only (Off-line) or incrementally along evolution (On-line). Experiments on a set of benchmark problems show that Off-line outperforms single-hypothesis evolutionary learning and state-of-art Boosting and generates smaller classifier ensembles.
@cite_9: Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for the construction of neural ensembles is a relatively new area of research. We recently proposed an ensemble learning algorithm called DIVACE (DIVerse and ACcurate Ensemble learning algorithm). It was shown that DIVACE tries to find an optimal trade-off between diversity and accuracy as it searches for an ensemble for some particular pattern recognition task by treating these two objectives explicitly separately. A detailed discussion of DIVACE together with further experimental studies form the essence of this paper. A new diversity measure which we call Pairwise Failure Crediting (PFC) is proposed. This measure forms one of the two evolutionary pressures being exerted explicitly in DIVACE. Experiments with this diversity measure as well as comparisons with previously studied approaches are hence considered. Detailed analysis of the results show that DIVACE, as a concept, has promise.
@cite_13: Ensembles of learning machines have been formally and empirically shown to outperform (generalise better than) single predictors in many cases. Evidence suggests that ensembles generalise better when they constitute members which form a diverse and accurate set. Additionally, there have been a multitude of theories on how one can enforce diversity within a combined predictor setup. We recently attempted to integrate these theories together into a co-evolutionary framework with a view to synthesising new evolutionary ensemble learning algorithms using the fact that multi-objective evolutionary optimisation is a formidable ensemble construction technique. This paper explicates on the intricacies of the proposed framework in addition to presenting detailed empirical results and comparisons with a wide range of algorithms in the machine learning literature. The framework treats diversity and accuracy as evolutionary pressures which are exerted at multiple levels of abstraction and is shown to be effective.
@cite_18: Ensemble methods are learning algorithms that construct a set of classifiers and then classify new data points by taking a (weighted) vote of their predictions. The original ensemble method is Bayesian averaging, but more recent algorithms include error-correcting output coding, Bagging, and boosting. This paper reviews these methods and explains why ensembles can often perform better than any single classifier. Some previous studies comparing ensemble methods are reviewed, and some new experiments are presented to uncover the reasons that Adaboost does not overfit rapidly.
While the MOO perspective nicely captures the interplay of the accuracy and diversity goals within Ensemble Learning, the selection of the classifiers in the genetic pool as done in @cite_9 @cite_13 does not fully exploit the possibilities of evolutionary optimization, in two respects. On the one hand, it only considers the final population that usually involves up to a few hundred classifiers, while learning ensembles commonly involve some thousand classifiers. On the other hand, clustering-based selection proceeds on the basis of the phenotypic distance between classifiers, considering again that all examples are equally important, while the higher stress put on harder examples is considered the source of the better Boosting efficiency @cite_18 .