Learning with ensembles

The goal of ensemble methods is to combine different classifiers into a meta-classifier that has better generalization performance than each individual classifier alone. For example, assuming that we collected predictions from 10 experts, ensemble methods would allow us to strategically combine those predictions by the 10 experts to come up with a prediction that was more accurate and robust than the predictions by each individual expert. As you will see later in this chapter, there are several different approaches for creating an ensemble of classifiers. This section will introduce a basic explanation of how ensembles work and why they are typically recognized for yielding a good generalization performance.

In this chapter, we will focus on the most popular ensemble methods that use the majority voting principle. Majority voting simply means that we select the class label that has been predicted by the majority of classifiers, that is, received more than...