OLP++: An online local classifier for high dimensional data

Abstract

Ensemble diversity is an important characteristic of Multiple Classifier Systems (MCS), which aim at improving the overall performance of a classification system by combining the response of several models. While diversity may be introduced through various manipulations at the data level and the model level, some MCSs incorporate local information in order to increase it and/or take advantage of it, based on the idea that the different classifiers in the ensemble may have expertise in distinct areas of the feature space.11Code available at: https://github.com/marianaasouza/olp_plusplus.Following a similar reasoning, we introduced in a previous work an ensemble method which produces in test time a few experts in the local region where each given query sample is located. These local experts, which are generated with slightly differing views of the target area, are then used to label the corresponding unknown instance. While the framework was shown to perform well especially over imbalanced problems, the locality definition in the method is based on the nearest neighbors rule and Euclidian distance, as is the case of various local-based ensembles, which may suffer from the effects of the curse of dimensionality over high dimensional problems. Thus, in this work, we propose a local ensemble method in which we leverage the data partitions given by decision trees for locality definition. More specifically, the partitions defined at different levels of the decision path that a given query instance traverses in the tree(s) are used as the regions over which the local experts are produced. By using different node levels from the path, each classifier in the local pool has a moderately distinct view of the target region without resorting to a dissimilarity metric, which might be susceptible to high dimensional spaces. Experimental results over 39 high dimensional problems showed that the proposed approach was significantly superior to our previous, distance-based framework in balanced accuracy rate. Compared to other six local-based ensemble methods, including dynamic selection and weighting schemes, the proposed method achieved competitive results, outperforming the random forest baseline and two state-of-the-art dynamic ensemble selection techniques.