1. Introduction to pattern classification. 1.1. Pattern classification. 1.2. Induction algorithms. 1.3. Rule induction. 1.4. Decision trees. 1.5. Bayesian methods. 1.6. Other induction methods -- 2. Introduction to ensemble learning. 2.1. Back to the roots. 2.2. The wisdom of crowds. 2.3. The bagging algorithm. 2.4. The boosting algorithm. 2.5. The AdaBoost algorithm. 2.6. No free lunch theorem and ensemble learning. 2.7. Bias-variance decomposition and ensemble learning. 2.8. Occam's razor and ensemble learning. 2.9. Classifier dependency. 2.10. Ensemble methods for advanced classification tasks -- 3. Ensemble classification. 3.1. Fusions methods. 3.2. Selecting classification. 3.3. Mixture of experts and meta learning -- 4. Ensemble diversity. 4.1. Overview. 4.2. Manipulating the inducer. 4.3. Manipulating the training samples. 4.4. Manipulating the target attribute representation. 4.5. Partitioning the search space. 4.6. Multi-inducers. 4.7. Measuring the diversity -- 5. Ensemble selection. 5.1. Ensemble selection. 5.2. Pre selection of the ensemble size. 5.3. Selection of the ensemble size while training. 5.4. Pruning - post selection of the ensemble size -- 6. Error correcting output codes. 6.1. Code-matrix decomposition of multiclass problems. 6.2. Type I - training an ensemble given a code-matrix. 6.3. Type II - adapting code-matrices to the multiclass problems -- 7. Evaluating ensembles of classifiers. 7.1. Generalization error. 7.2. Computational complexity. 7.3. Interpretability of the resulting ensemble. 7.4. Scalability to large datasets. 7.5. Robustness. 7.6. Stability. 7.7. Flexibility. 7.8. Usability. 7.9. Software availability. 7.10. Which ensemble method should be used?

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 updated compendium provides a methodical introduction with a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges, and applications. More than a third of this edition comprised of new materials, highlighting descriptions of the classic methods, and extensions and novel approaches that have recently been introduced.Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, the settings in which each method is applicable and the consequences and tradeoffs incurred by using the method is succinctly featured. R code for implementation of the algorithm is also emphasized.The unique volume provides researchers, students and practitioners in industry with a comprehensive, concise and convenient resource on ensemble learning methods.

Predictive performance is the most important concern on many classification and regression problems. Ensemble learning algorithms combine the predictions from multiple models and are designed to perform better than any contributing ensemble member. Using clear explanations, standard Python libraries, and step-by-step tutorial lessons, you will discover how to confidently and effectively improve predictive modeling performance using ensemble algorithms.

This updated compendium provides a methodical introduction with a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges, and applications. More than a third of this edition comprised of new materials, highlighting descriptions of the classic methods, and extensions and novel approaches that have recently been introduced. Along with algorithmic descriptions of each method, the settings in which each method is applicable and the consequences and tradeoffs incurred by using the method is succinctly featured. R code for implementation of the algorithm is also emphasized. The unique volume provides researchers, students and practitioners in industry with a comprehensive, concise and convenient resource on ensemble learning methods.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. Karl Marx A Universial Genius of the 19th Century Many scientists from all over the world during the past two years since the MLDM 2007 have come along on the stony way to the sunny summit of science and have worked hard on new ideas and applications in the area of data mining in pattern r- ognition. Our thanks go to all those who took part in this year's MLDM. We appre- ate their submissions and the ideas shared with the Program Committee. We received over 205 submissions from all over the world to the International Conference on - chine Learning and Data Mining, MLDM 2009. The Program Committee carefully selected the best papers for this year’s program and gave detailed comments on each submitted paper. There were 63 papers selected for oral presentation and 17 papers for poster presentation. The topics range from theoretical topics for classification, clustering, association rule and pattern mining to specific data-mining methods for the different multimedia data types such as image mining, text mining, video mining and Web mining. Among these topics this year were special contributions to subtopics such as attribute discre- zation and data preparation, novelty and outlier detection, and distances and simila- ties.

An essential guide to two burgeoning topics in machine learning – classification trees and ensemble learning Ensemble Classification Methods with Applications in R introduces the concepts and principles of ensemble classifiers methods and includes a review of the most commonly used techniques. This important resource shows how ensemble classification has become an extension of the individual classifiers. The text puts the emphasis on two areas of machine learning: classification trees and ensemble learning. The authors explore ensemble classification methods’ basic characteristics and explain the types of problems that can emerge in its application. Written by a team of noted experts in the field, the text is divided into two main sections. The first section outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the topic and the second section is designed to include examples of practical applications. The book contains a wealth of illustrative cases of business failure prediction, zoology, ecology and others. This vital guide: Offers an important text that has been tested both in the classroom and at tutorials at conferences Contains authoritative information written by leading experts in the field Presents a comprehensive text that can be applied to courses in machine learning, data mining and artificial intelligence Combines in one volume two of the most intriguing topics in machine learning: ensemble learning and classification trees Written for researchers from many fields such as biostatistics, economics, environment, zoology, as well as students of data mining and machine learning, Ensemble Classification Methods with Applications in R puts the focus on two topics in machine learning: classification trees and ensemble learning.