Summary

In this chapter, we looked at some of the most popular and widely used techniques for ensemble learning. Ensemble methods combine different classification models to cancel out their individual weaknesses, which often results in stable and well-performing models that are very attractive for industrial applications as well as machine learning competitions.

At the beginning of this chapter, we implemented MajorityVoteClassifier in Python, which allows us to combine different algorithms for classification. We then looked at bagging, a useful technique for reducing the variance of a model by drawing random bootstrap samples from the training dataset and combining the individually trained classifiers via majority vote. Lastly, we learned about AdaBoost, which is an algorithm that is based on weak learners that subsequently learn from mistakes.

Throughout the previous chapters, we learned a lot about different learning algorithms, tuning, and evaluation techniques. In the next...