Applications Of Supervised And Unsupervised Ensemble Methods

Expanding upon presentations at last year’s SUEMA (Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Applications) meeting, this volume explores recent developments in the field. Useful examples act as a guide for practitioners in computational intelligence.

Expanding upon presentations at last year’s SUEMA (Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and Applications) meeting, this volume explores recent developments in the field. Useful examples act as a guide for practitioners in computational intelligence.

This book results from the workshop on Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and their Applications (briefly, SUEMA) in June 2007 in Girona, Spain. This workshop was held alongside the 3rd Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis.

It is common wisdom that gathering a variety of views and inputs improves the process of decision making, and, indeed, underpins a democratic society. Dubbed “ensemble learning” by researchers in computational intelligence and machine learning, it is known to improve a decision system’s robustness and accuracy. Now, fresh developments are allowing researchers to unleash the power of ensemble learning in an increasing range of real-world applications. Ensemble learning algorithms such as “boosting” and “random forest” facilitate solutions to key computational issues such as face recognition and are now being applied in areas as diverse as object tracking and bioinformatics. Responding to a shortage of literature dedicated to the topic, this volume offers comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art ensemble learning techniques, including the random forest skeleton tracking algorithm in the Xbox Kinect sensor, which bypasses the need for game controllers. At once a solid theoretical study and a practical guide, the volume is a windfall for researchers and practitioners alike.

This book contains the extended papers presented at the 3rd Workshop on Supervised and Unsupervised Ensemble Methods and their Applications (SUEMA) that was held in conjunction with the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD 2010, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). As its two predecessors, its main theme was ensembles of supervised and unsupervised algorithms – advanced machine learning and data mining technique. Unlike a single classification or clustering algorithm, an ensemble is a group of algorithms, each of which first independently solves the task at hand by assigning a class or cluster label (voting) to instances in a dataset and after that all votes are combined together to produce the final class or cluster membership. As a result, ensembles often outperform best single algorithms in many real-world problems. This book consists of 14 chapters, each of which can be read independently of the others. In addition to two previous SUEMA editions, also published by Springer, many chapters in the current book include pseudo code and/or programming code of the algorithms described in them. This was done in order to facilitate ensemble adoption in practice and to help to both researchers and engineers developing ensemble applications.

An up-to-date, self-contained introduction to a state-of-the-art machine learning approach, Ensemble Methods: Foundations and Algorithms shows how these accurate methods are used in real-world tasks. It gives you the necessary groundwork to carry out further research in this evolving field. After presenting background and terminology, the book covers the main algorithms and theories, including Boosting, Bagging, Random Forest, averaging and voting schemes, the Stacking method, mixture of experts, and diversity measures. It also discusses multiclass extension, noise tolerance, error-ambiguity and bias-variance decompositions, and recent progress in information theoretic diversity. Moving on to more advanced topics, the author explains how to achieve better performance through ensemble pruning and how to generate better clustering results by combining multiple clusterings. In addition, he describes developments of ensemble methods in semi-supervised learning, active learning, cost-sensitive learning, class-imbalance learning, and comprehensibility enhancement.

This book covers the state of the art in learning algorithms with an inclusion of semi-supervised methods to provide a broad scope of clustering and classification solutions for big data applications. Case studies and best practices are included along with theoretical models of learning for a comprehensive reference to the field. The book is organized into eight chapters that cover the following topics: discretization, feature extraction and selection, classification, clustering, topic modeling, graph analysis and applications. Practitioners and graduate students can use the volume as an important reference for their current and future research and faculty will find the volume useful for assignments in presenting current approaches to unsupervised and semi-supervised learning in graduate-level seminar courses. The book is based on selected, expanded papers from the Fourth International Conference on Soft Computing in Data Science (2018). Includes new advances in clustering and classification using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Address new challenges arising in feature extraction and selection using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Features applications from healthcare, engineering, and text/social media mining that exploit techniques from semi-supervised and unsupervised learning.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of ensemble learning in the field of feature selection (FS), which consists of combining the output of multiple methods to obtain better results than any single method. It reviews various techniques for combining partial results, measuring diversity and evaluating ensemble performance. With the advent of Big Data, feature selection (FS) has become more necessary than ever to achieve dimensionality reduction. With so many methods available, it is difficult to choose the most appropriate one for a given setting, thus making the ensemble paradigm an interesting alternative. The authors first focus on the foundations of ensemble learning and classical approaches, before diving into the specific aspects of ensembles for FS, such as combining partial results, measuring diversity and evaluating ensemble performance. Lastly, the book shows examples of successful applications of ensembles for FS and introduces the new challenges that researchers now face. As such, the book offers a valuable guide for all practitioners, researchers and graduate students in the areas of machine learning and data mining.