Affiliations: [a]
School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China
| [b] Key Laboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision-making, Ministry of Education, Hefei, China
| [c]
Business School, Huzhou University, Huzhou, China
| [d]
School of Management Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. Zhiwei Ni. E-mail: zhiwein@163.com.
Abstract: Ensemble pruning is usually used to improve classification ability of an ensemble using less number of classifiers, and it is an NP-hard problem. Existing ensemble pruning approaches always find the optimal sub-ensemble using diversity of classifiers or running heuristic search algorithms separately. Diversity and accuracy of classifiers are widely recognized as two important properties of an ensemble. The increase of the diversity of classifiers must lead to the decrease of the average accuracy of the whole classifiers, and vice versa, so there is a tradeoff between diversity and accuracy of classifiers. Finding the tradeoff is the key to a successful ensemble. Heuristic algorithms have good results when it comes to finding the tradeoff, but it is unfeasible to do an exhaustive search. Hence, we propose a Spread Binary Artificial Fish swarm algorithm combined with a Double-fault measure for Ensemble Pruning (SBAFDEP) using a combination of diversity measures and heuristic algorithms. First, the classifiers in an initial pool are pre-pruned using a double-fault measure, which significantly alleviates the computational complexity of ensemble pruning. Second, the final ensemble is efficiently assembled from the retaining classifiers after pre-pruning using the proposed Spread Binary Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (SBAFSA). Simulation and experiment results on 25 UCI datasets show that SBAFDEP performs better than other state-of-the-art pruning approaches. It provides a novel research idea for ensemble pruning.
