Skip to main content

Ensemble Learning

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

Synonyms

Committee-based learning; Multiple classifier systems; Classifier combination

Definition

Ensemble learning is a machine learning paradigm where multiple learners are trained to solve the same problem. In contrast to ordinary machine learning approaches which try to learn one hypothesis from training data, ensemble methods try to construct a set of hypotheses and combine them to use.

Introduction

An ensemble contains a number of learners which are usually called base learners. The generalization ability of an ensemble is usually much stronger than that of base learners. Actually, ensemble learning is appealing because that it is able to boost weak learners which are slightly better than random guess to strong learnerswhich can make very accurate predictions. So, “base learners” are also referred as “weak learners”. It is noteworthy, however, that although most theoretical analyses work on weak learners, base learners used in practice are not necessarily weak since using...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 449.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Hansen, L.K., Salamon, P.: Neural network ensembles. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analy. Mach. Intell. 12(10), 993–1001 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Schapire R.E.: The strength of weak learnability. Mach. Learn. 5(2), 197–227 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Krogh, A., Vedelsby, J.: Neural network ensembles, cross validation, and active learning. In: Tesauro, G. Touretzky, D.S. Leen T.K. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 7, pp. 231–238. MIT, Cambridge, MA , (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kuncheva, L.I., Whitaker, C.J.: Measures of diversity in classifier ensembles and their relationship with the ensemble accuracy. Mach. Learn. 51(2), 181–207 (2003)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. Freund, Y., Schapire, R.E.: A decision-theoretic generalization of on-line learning and an application to Boosting. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 55(1), 119–139 (1997)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  6. Breiman, L.: Bagging predictors. Mach. Learn. 24(2), 123–140 (1996)

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Wolpert, D.H.: Stacked generalization. Neural Networks 5(2), 241–260 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Breiman, L.: Random forests. Mach. Learn. 45(1), 5–32 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Bauer, E., Kohavi, R.: An empirical comparison of voting classification algorithms: Bagging, Boosting, and variants. Mach. Learn. 36(1–2), 105–139 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Ting, K.M., Witten, I.H.: Issues in stacked generalization. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 10, 271–289 (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Opitz, D., Maclin, R.: Popular ensemble methods: An empirical study. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 11, 169–198 (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Zhou, Z.H., Wu, J., Tang, W.: Ensembling neural networks: Many could be better than all. Artif. Intell. 137(1–2), 239–263 (2002)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  13. Strehl, A., Ghosh, J.: Cluster ensembles - a knowledge reuse framework for combining multiple partitionings. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3, 583–617 (2002)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Dietterich, T.G.: Machine learning research: Four current directions. AI Mag. 18(4), 97–136 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Zhou, Z.H., Jiang, Y., Chen, S.F.: Extracting symbolic rules from trained neural network ensembles.. AI Commun. 16(1), 3–15 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this entry

Cite this entry

Zhou, ZH. (2009). Ensemble Learning. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_293

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics