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Ensembling And Its Few Applications

By Moloy De posted Sat April 29, 2023 01:23 AM

  
Ensemble learning is a general meta approach to machine learning that seeks better predictive performance by combining the predictions from multiple models.
 
Although there are a seemingly unlimited number of ensembles that one can develop for your predictive modeling problem, there are three methods that dominate the field of ensemble learning. So much so, that rather than algorithms per se, each is a field of study that has spawned many more specialized methods.
 
The three main classes of ensemble learning methods are bagging, stacking, and boosting. Bagging involves fitting many decision trees on different samples of the same dataset and averaging the predictions. Stacking involves fitting many different models types on the same data and using another model to learn how to best combine the predictions. Boosting involves adding ensemble members sequentially that correct the predictions made by prior models and outputs a weighted average of the predictions.
 
Below are few successful application areas of ensembling techniques:
 
Land cover mapping
 
Land cover mapping is one of the major applications of Earth observation satellite sensors, using remote sensing and geospatial data, to identify the materials and objects which are located on the surface of target areas. Generally, the classes of target materials include roads, buildings, rivers, lakes, and vegetation. Some different ensemble learning approaches based on artificial neural networks, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), decision trees with boosting, random forest and automatic design of multiple classifier systems, are proposed to efficiently identify land cover objects.
 
Change detection
 
Change detection is an image analysis problem, consisting of the identification of places where the land cover has changed over time. Change detection is widely used in fields such as urban growth, forest and vegetation dynamics, land use and disaster monitoring. The earliest applications of ensemble classifiers in change detection are designed with the majority voting, Bayesian average and the maximum posterior probability.
 
Distributed denial of service
 
Distributed denial of service is one of the most threatening cyber-attacks that may happen to an internet service provider. By combining the output of single classifiers, ensemble classifiers reduce the total error of detecting and discriminating such attacks from legitimate flash crowds.
 
Malware Detection
 
Classification of malware codes such as computer viruses, computer worms, trojans, ransomware and spywares with the usage of machine learning techniques, is inspired by the document categorization problem. Ensemble learning systems have shown a proper efficacy in this area.
 
Intrusion detection
 
An intrusion detection system monitors computer network or computer systems to identify intruder codes like an anomaly detection process. Ensemble learning successfully aids such monitoring systems to reduce their total error.
 
Face recognition
 
Face recognition, which recently has become one of the most popular research areas of pattern recognition, copes with identification or verification of a person by their digital images. Hierarchical ensembles based on Gabor Fisher classifier and independent component analysis preprocessing techniques are some of the earliest ensembles employed in this field.
 
Emotion recognition
 
While speech recognition is mainly based on deep learning because most of the industry players in this field like Google, Microsoft and IBM reveal that the core technology of their speech recognition is based on this approach, speech-based emotion recognition can also have a satisfactory performance with ensemble learning. It is also being successfully used in facial emotion recognition.
 
Fraud detection
 
Fraud detection deals with the identification of bank fraud, such as money laundering, credit card fraud and telecommunication fraud, which have vast domains of research and applications of machine learning. Because ensemble learning improves the robustness of the normal behavior modelling, it has been proposed as an efficient technique to detect such fraudulent cases and activities in banking and credit card systems.
 
Financial decision-making
 
The accuracy of prediction of business failure is a very crucial issue in financial decision-making. Therefore, different ensemble classifiers are proposed to predict financial crises and financial distress. Also, in the trade-based manipulation problem, where traders attempt to manipulate stock prices by buying and selling activities, ensemble classifiers are required to analyze the changes in the stock market data and detect suspicious symptom of stock price manipulation.
 
Medicine
 
Ensemble classifiers have been successfully applied in neuroscience, proteomics and medical diagnosis like in neuro-cognitive disorder (i.e. Alzheimer or myotonic dystrophy) detection based on MRI datasets, and cervical cytology classification.

Empirically, ensembles tend to yield better results when there is a significant diversity among the models. Many ensemble methods, therefore, seek to promote diversity among the models they combine. Although perhaps non-intuitive, more random algorithms like random decision trees, can be used to produce a stronger ensemble than very deliberate algorithms like entropy-reducing decision trees. Using a variety of strong learning algorithms, however, has been shown to be more effective than using techniques that attempt to dumb-down the models in order to promote diversity. It is possible to increase diversity in the training stage of the model using correlation for regression tasks or using information measures such as cross entropy for classification tasks.

QUESTION I: Why ensembling is expected to perform better than its components?

QUESTION II: Is there an upper bound for the performance of the ensembler?

REFERENCE: A Blog, Wikipedia

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