Bagged voting ensembles

Abstract

Bayesian and decision tree classifiers are among the most popular classifiers used in the data mining community and recently numerous researchers have examined their sufficiency in ensembles. Although, many methods of ensemble creation have been proposed, there is as yet no clear picture of which method is best. In this work, we propose Bagged Voting using different subsets of the same training dataset with the concurrent usage of a voting methodology that combines a Bayesian and a decision tree algorithm. In our algorithm, voters express the degree of their preference using as confidence score the probabilities of classifiers' prediction. Next all confidence values are added for each candidate and the candidate with the highest sum wins the election. We performed a comparison of the presented ensemble with other ensembles that use either the Bayesian or the decision tree classifier as base learner and we took better accuracy in most cases. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.