A Balanced Ensemble Approach to Weighting Classifiers for Text Classification

This paper studies the problem of constructing an effective heterogeneous ensemble classifier for text classification. One major challenge of this problem is to formulate a good combination function, which combines the decisions of the individual classifiers in the ensemble. We show that the classification performance is affected by three weight components and they should be included in deriving an effective combination function. They are: (1) Global effectiveness, which measures the effectiveness of a member classifier in classifying a set of unseen documents; (2) Local effectiveness, which measures the effectiveness of a member classifier in classifying the particular domain of an unseen document; and (3) Decision confidence, which describes how confident a classifier is when making a decision when classifying a specific unseen document. We propose a new balanced combination function, called dynamic classifier weighting (DCW), that incorporates the aforementioned three components. The empirical study demonstrates that the new combination function is highly effective for text classification.