Title
Generalized Ambiguity Decomposition for Understanding Ensemble Diversity.
Abstract
Diversity or complementarity of experts in ensemble pattern recognition and information processing systems is widely-observed by researchers to be crucial for achieving performance improvement upon fusion. Understanding this link between ensemble diversity and fusion performance is thus an important research question. However, prior works have theoretically characterized ensemble diversity and have linked it with ensemble performance in very restricted settings. We present a generalized ambiguity decomposition (GAD) theorem as a broad framework for answering these questions. The GAD theorem applies to a generic convex ensemble of experts for any arbitrary twice-differentiable loss function. It shows that the ensemble performance approximately decomposes into a difference of the average expert performance and the diversity of the ensemble. It thus provides a theoretical explanation for the empirically-observed benefit of fusing outputs from diverse classifiers and regressors. It also provides a loss function-dependent, ensemble-dependent, and data-dependent definition of diversity. We present extensions of this decomposition to common regression and classification loss functions, and report a simulation-based analysis of the diversity term and the accuracy of the decomposition. We finally present experiments on standard pattern recognition data sets which indicate the accuracy of the decomposition for real-world classification and regression problems.
Year
Venue
Field
2013
CoRR
Complementarity (molecular biology),Data set,Information processing,Regression,Regular polygon,Artificial intelligence,Ensemble learning,Ambiguity,Mathematics,Machine learning,Performance improvement
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1312.7463
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
23
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kartik Audhkhasi118923.25
Abhinav Sethy236331.16
Bhuvana Ramabhadran31779153.83
Narayanan Shrikanth45558439.23