The quote at the beginning of this chapter mentions using ensembles to win machine learning competitions. However, they do have practical applications. I've provided a definition of what ensemble modeling is, but why does it work? To demonstrate this, I've co-opted an example from the following blog, which goes into depth at a number of ensemble methods: http://mlwave.com/kaggle-ensembling-guide/.
As I write this chapter, we're only a day away from the 2018 College Football Championship—the Clemson Tigers versus the Alabama Crimson Tide. Let's say we want to review our probability of winning a friendly wager where we want to take the Tide minus the points (5.5 points at the time of writing).
Assume that we've been following three expert prognosticators who said, All have the same probability of predicting that the Patriots will cover the...
