Forests of unstable hierarchical clusters for pattern classification

Abstract

Classification of patterns is a key ability shared by intelligent systems. One of the crucial components of a pattern classification pipeline is the classifier. There have been many classifiers that have been proposed in literature, and it has been shown recently that ensembles of decisions trees tend to perform and generalize well to unseen test data. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble classifier that consists of a diverse group of hierarchical clusterings on data. The proposed algorithm is fast to train, fully automatic and outperforms existing decision tree ensemble techniques and other state-of-the-art classifiers. We empirically show the effectiveness of the algorithm by evaluating on four publicly available datasets.