Subspace ensembles for classification

Ensemble learning constitutes one of the principal current directions in machine learning and data mining. In this paper, we explore subspace ensembles for classification by manipulating different feature subspaces. Commencing with the nature of ensemble efficacy, we probe into the microcosmic meaning of ensemble diversity, and propose to use region partitioning and region weighting to implement effective subspace ensembles. Individual classifiers possessing eminent performance on a partitioned region reflected by high neighborhood accuracies are deemed to contribute largely to this region, and are assigned large weights in determining the labels of instances in this area. A robust algorithm “Sena” that incarnates the mechanism is presented, which is insensitive to the number of nearest neighbors chosen to calculate neighborhood accuracies. The algorithm exhibits improved performance over the well-known ensembles of bagging, AdaBoost and random subspace. The difference of its effectivity with varying base classifiers is also investigated.