Dynamic ensemble selection for author verification

Abstract

Author verification is a fundamental task in authorship analysis and associated with significant applications in humanities, cyber-security, and social media analytics. In some of the relevant studies, there is evidence that heterogeneous ensembles can provide very reliable solutions, better than any individual verification model. However, there is no systematic study of examining the application of ensemble methods in this task. In this paper, we start from a large set of base verification models covering the main paradigms in this area and study how they can be combined to build an accurate ensemble. We propose a simple stacking ensemble as well as a dynamic ensemble selection approach that can use the most reliable base models for each verification case separately. The experimental results in ten benchmark corpora covering multiple languages and genres verify the suitability of ensembles for this task and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in some cases improving the best reported results by more than 10%.