Majority Voting Rule Research Articles

Efficient combination of classifiers for 3D action recognition

The popular task of 3D human action recognition is almost exclusively solved by training deep-learning classifiers. To achieve high recognition accuracy, input 3D actions are often pre-processed by various normalization or augmentation techniques. However, it is not computationally feasible to train a classifier for each possible variant of training data to select the best-performing combination of pre-processing techniques for a given dataset. In this paper, we propose an evaluation procedure that determines the best combination in a very efficient way. In particular, we only train one independent classifier for each available pre-processing technique and estimate the accuracy of a specific combination by efficient fusion of the corresponding classification results based on a strict majority vote rule. In addition, for the best-ranked combination, we can retrospectively apply the normalized/augmented variants of input data to train only a single classifier. This enables to decide whether it is generally better to train a single model, or rather a set of independent classifiers whose results are fused within the classification phase. We evaluate the experiments on single-subject as well as person-interaction datasets of 3D skeleton sequences and all combinations of up to 16 normalization and augmentation techniques, some of which are proposed in this paper.

Classification of electrocardiogram signal using an ensemble of deep learning models

PurposeAccording to the World Health Organization, arrhythmia is one of the primary causes of deaths across the globe. In order to reduce mortality rate, cardiovascular disease should be properly identified and the proper treatment for the same should be immediately provided to the patients. The objective of this paper was to implement a better heartbeat classification model which will work better than the other implemented heartbeat classification methods.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the ensemble of two deep learning models is proposed to classify the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database into four different classes according to ANSI-AAMI standards. First, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is used to classify heartbeats on a raw data set. Secondly, four features (wavelets, R-R intervals, morphological and higher-order statistics) are extracted from the data set and then applied to a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to classify the heartbeats. Finally, the ensemble of CNN and LSTM model with sum rule, product rule and majority voting has been used to identify the heartbeat classes.FindingsAmong these, the highest accuracy obtained is 98.58% using ensemble method with product rule. The results show that the ensemble of CNN and BLSTM has offered satisfactory performance compared to other techniques discussed in this study.Originality/valueIn this study, we have developed a new combination of two deep learning models to enhance the performance of arrhythmia classification using segmentation of input ECG signals. The contributions of this study are as follows: First, a deep CNN model is built to classify ECG heartbeat using a raw data set. Second, four types of features (R-R interval, HOS, morphological and wavelet) were extracted from the raw data set and then applied to the bidirectional LSTM model to classify the ECG heartbeat. Third, combination rules (sum rules, product rules and majority voting rules) were tested to ensure the accumulated probabilities of the CNN and LSTM models.

An ensemble classification based approach for breast cancer prediction

Breast cancer is the second major reason for deaths in women. Early detection of the breast cancer and receiving the appropriate treatment can reduce the death rates as survival becomes hard in the higher stages of the tumor growth. Application of machine learning in healthcare play a key role in aiding the clinical experts to detect the disease at a early stage and perform precise assessment. This paper proposes a pattern recognition methodology that uses breast cancer biomarkers as the attributes and ensemble classification approach for accurately detecting the presence of cancer. The proposed method was evaluated for the samples of the breast cancer Coimbra dataset by fusing the decisions of naive Baye’s, radial basis function neural network and linear discriminant analysis classifiers based on majority voting rule. The experimental results demonstrated the enhanced performance of the system with fusion of classifiers as compared to the single classifiers.

How Does the Majority Voting Rule of Director Election Influence Firm Value?

How Does the Majority Voting Rule of Director Election Influence Firm Value?

Is Majority Rule Justified in Constitutional Adjudication?

Abstract In this article, I challenge the use of a majority voting rule (majority rule) to declare statutes unconstitutional in many constitutional courts. To do this, I briefly present four main features of majority rule and assess whether these features (separately and jointly considered) provide definitive reasons for using this voting rule over others in constitutional adjudication. I conclude that these features do not provide such reasons either individually or taken together. This conclusion enables one to analyse whether constitutional courts should use other voting rules in constitutional adjudication, such as supermajority rules.

A novel method for spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images with a high spatial resolution

In this research, a new method for spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images based on hierarchical segmentation algorithm is introduced. Among the various spectral-spatial classification algorithms, the marker-based hierarchical segmentation algorithm has so far achieved the best results in combination with the support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithm. In the proposed method adopted in this research, the dimensions of the hyperspectral image were reduced via the minimum noise fraction (MNF) algorithm. Then, five spatial/texture features of wavelet transform, Gabor transform, mean, entropy, and contrast were extracted from the obtained bands. Later on, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network and SVM classification algorithms were applied to the obtained spectral and texture features, and their results were combined. The resulting map was then used to select the markers and to combine them with the marker-based hierarchical segmentation algorithm using the majority voting rule. The proposed method was applied to three hyperspectral images, Pavia, Telops, and Washington DC Mall. The results of the experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the initial marker-based hierarchical algorithm. Quantitatively, it was better by 8, 12, and 9% for the Pavia, Telops, and Washington DC Mall datasets regarding the Kappa coefficient parameter, respectively.

A Majority Rule-Based Measure for Atanassov-Type Intuitionistic Membership Grades in MCDM

Orderly Atanassov-type intuitionistic membership grades would be required in decision-making problems, however, sometime they are not completely ordered. To solve this problem, in this article we propose a quantification method for Atanassov-type intuitionistic membership grades, and use it to rank them. According to the majority voting rules, we introduce the measurement function for membership degree. We quantify the uncertainty of information and the preferences of decision-makers conveyed through intuitionistic fuzzy sets. We then use the introduced surrogates to construct the measurement for membership grades. The properties and some logical operations of measurement value are also studied. We recommend using the Takagi–Sugeno model and method to assign values to tuning parameters <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$</tex-math></inline-formula> . Moreover, we present two models for multicriteria decision-making problem, which use the measurement to determine the ranking between sets. Finally, a numerical example of supplier selection is given to show the competitive performance of the proposed method in terms of efficiency and feasibility.

Decision Tree Integration Using Dynamic Regions of Competence

A vital aspect of the Multiple Classifier Systems construction process is the base model integration. For example, the Random Forest approach used the majority voting rule to fuse the base classifiers obtained by bagging the training dataset. In this paper we propose the algorithm that uses partitioning the feature space whose split is determined by the decision rules of each decision tree node which is the base classification model. After dividing the feature space, the centroid of each new subspace is determined. This centroids are used in order to determine the weights needed in the integration phase based on the weighted majority voting rule. The proposal was compared with other Multiple Classifier Systems approaches. The experiments regarding multiple open-source benchmarking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To discuss the results of our experiments, we use micro and macro-average classification performance measures.

A systematic mapping study for ensemble classification methods in cardiovascular disease

Ensemble methods overcome the limitations of single machine learning techniques by combining different techniques, and are employed in the quest to achieve a high level of accuracy. This approach has been investigated in various fields, one of them being that of bioinformatics. One of the most frequent applications of ensemble techniques involves research into cardiovascular diseases, which are considered the leading cause of death worldwide. The purpose of this research work is to identify the papers that investigate ensemble classification techniques applied to cardiology diseases, and to analyse them according to nine aspects: their publication venues, the medical tasks tackled, the empirical and research types adopted, the types of ensembles proposed, the single techniques used to construct the ensembles, the validation frameworks adopted to evaluate the proposed ensembles, the tools used to build the ensembles, and the optimization methods employed for the single techniques. This paper reports the carrying out of a systematic mapping study. An extensive automatic search in four digital libraries: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, PubMed, and Scopus, followed by a study selection process, resulted in the identification of 351 papers that were used to address our mapping questions. This study found that the papers selected had been published in a large number of different resources. The medical task addressed most frequently by the selected studies was diagnosis. In addition, the experiment-based empirical type and evaluation-based research type were the most dominant approaches adopted by the selected studies. Homogeneous ensembles were the ensemble type that was developed most often in literature, while decision trees, artificial neural networks and Bayesian classifiers were the single techniques used most frequently to develop ensemble classification methods. The weighted majority and majority voting rules were adopted to obtain the final decision of the ensembles developed. With regard to evaluation frameworks, the datasets obtained from the UCI and PhysioBank repositories were those used most often to evaluate the ensemble methods, while the k-fold cross-validation method was the most frequently-employed validation technique. Several tools with which to build ensemble classifiers were identified, and the type of software adopted with the greatest frequency was open source. Finally, only a few researchers took into account the optimization of the parameter settings of either single or meta ensemble classifiers. This mapping study attempts to provide a greater insight into the application of ensemble classification methods in cardiovascular diseases. The majority of the selected papers reported positive feedback as regards the ability of ensemble methods to perform better than single methods. Further analysis is required to aggregate the evidence reported in literature.

Crowdvoting Judgment: An Analysis of Modern Peer Review

In this paper, we propose and analyze models of self policing in online communities, in which assessment activities, typically handled by firm employees, are shifted to the “crowd.” Our underlying objective is to maximize firm value by maintaining the quality of the online community to prevent attrition, which, given a parsimonious model of voter participation, we show can be achieved by efficiently utilizing the crowd of volunteer voters. To do so, we focus on minimizing the number of voters needed for each assessment, subject to service-level constraints, which depends on a voting aggregation rule. We focus our attention on classes of voting aggregators that are simple, interpretable, and implementable, which increases the chance of adoption in practice. We consider static and dynamic variants of simple majority-rule voting, with which each vote is treated equally. We also study static and dynamic variants of a more sophisticated voting rule that allows more accurate voters to have a larger influence in determining the aggregate decision. We consider both independent and correlated voters and show that correlation is detrimental to performance. Finally, we take a system view and characterize the limit of a costless crowdvoting system that relies solely on volunteer voters. If this limit does not satisfy target service levels, then costly firm employees are needed to supplement the crowd.

Improving predictive performance on survival in dairy cattle using an ensemble learning approach

Cow survival is a complex trait that combines traits like milk production, fertility, health and environmental factors such as farm management. This complexity makes survival difficult to predict accurately. This is probably the reason why few studies attempted to address this problem and no studies are published that use ensemble methods for this purpose. We explored if we could improve prediction of cow survival to second lactation, when predicted at five different moments in a cow’s life, by combining the predictions of multiple (weak) methods in an ensemble method. We tested four ensemble methods: majority voting rule, multiple logistic regression, random forest and naive Bayes. Precision, recall, balanced accuracy, area under the curve (AUC) and gains in proportion of surviving cows in a scenario where the best 50% were selected were used to evaluate the ensemble model performance. We also calculated correlations between the ensemble models and obtained McNemar’s test statistics. We compared the performance of the ensemble methods against those of the individual methods. We also tested if there was a difference in performance metrics when continuous (from 0 to 1) and binary (0 or 1) prediction outcomes were used. In general, using continuous prediction output resulted in higher performance metrics than binary ones. AUCs for models ranged from 0.561 to 0.731, with generally increasing performance at moments later in life. Precision, AUC and balanced accuracy values improved significantly for the naive Bayes and multiple logistic regression ensembles in at least one data set, although performance metrics did remain low overall. The multiple logistic regression ensemble method resulted in equal or better precision, AUC, balanced accuracy and proportion of animals surviving on all datasets and was significantly different from the other ensembles in three out of five moments. The random forest ensemble method resulted in the least significant improvement over the individual methods.

A mapping study of ensemble classification methods in lung cancer decision support systems.

Achieving a high level of classification accuracy in medical datasets is a capital need for researchers to provide effective decision systems to assist doctors in work. In many domains of artificial intelligence, ensemble classification methods are able to improve the performance of single classifiers. This paper reports the state of the art of ensemble classification methods in lung cancer detection. We have performed a systematic mapping study to identify the most interesting papers concerning this topic. A total of 65 papers published between 2000 and 2018 were selected after an automatic search in four digital libraries and a careful selection process. As a result, it was observed that diagnosis was the task most commonly studied; homogeneous ensembles and decision trees were the most frequently adopted for constructing ensembles; and the majority voting rule was the predominant combination rule. Few studies considered the parameter tuning of the techniques used. These findings open several perspectives for researchers to enhance lung cancer research by addressing the identified gaps, such as investigating different classification methods, proposing other heterogeneous ensemble methods, and using new combination rules. Graphical abstract Main features of the mapping study performed in ensemble classification methods applied on lung cancer decision support systems.

Ensemble Learning Using Fuzzy Weights to Improve Learning Style Identification for Adapted Instructional Routines.

Mobile personalized learning can be achieved by the identification of students’ learning styles; however, this happens with the completion of large questionnaires. This task has been reported as tedious and time-consuming, causing random selection of the questionnaires’ choices, and thus, erroneous adaptation to students’ needs, endangering knowledge acquisition. Moreover, mobile environments render the selection of questionnaires’ choices impractical due to confined mobile user interfaces. In view of the above, this paper presents Learnglish, a fully developed mobile language learning system incorporating automatic identification of students’ learning styles according to the Felder-Silverman model (FSLSM) using ensemble classification. In particular, three classifiers, namely SVM, NB and KNN, are combined based on the majority voting rule. The major innovation of this task, apart from the ensemble classification and the mobile learning environment, is that Learnglish takes as input a minimum number of personal (i.e., age and gender) and cognitive characteristics (i.e., prior academic performance categorized using fuzzy weights), and solely four questions pertaining to the FSLSM dimensions, to identify the learning style. Furthermore, Learnglish incorporates adapted instructional routines to create an individualized learning environment based on students’ learning preferences as determined by their style. Learnglish was fully evaluated with very encouraging results.

A Novel Approach to the Unsupervised Extraction of Reliable Training Samples From Thematic Products

Supervised classification algorithms require a sufficiently large set of representative training samples to generate accurate land-cover maps. Collecting reference data is difficult, expensive, and unfeasible at the large scale. To solve this problem, this article introduces a novel approach that aims to extract reliable labeled data from existing thematic products. Although these products represent a potentially useful information source, their use is not straightforward. They are not completely reliable since they may present classification errors. They are typically aggregated at polygon level, where polygons do not necessarily correspond to homogeneous areas. Finally, usually, there is a semantic gap between map legends and remote sensing (RS) data. In this context, we propose an approach that aims to: 1) perform a domain understanding to detect the discrepancies between the thematic map domain and the RS data domain; 2) use RS data contemporary to the map to decompose the thematic product from the semantic and spatial viewpoints; and 3) extract a database of informative and reliable training samples. The database of weak labeled units is used for training an ensemble of classifiers on recent data whose results are then combined in a majority voting rule. Two sets of experimental results obtained on MS images by extracting training samples from a crop type map and the 2018 Corine Land Cover (CLC) map, respectively, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Traditional Chinese Medicine Assistive Diagnostic System: Validation Study.

BackgroundArtificial intelligence–based assistive diagnostic systems imitate the deductive reasoning process of a human physician in biomedical disease diagnosis and treatment decision making. While impressive progress in this area has been reported, most of the reported successes are applications of artificial intelligence in Western medicine. The application of artificial intelligence in traditional Chinese medicine has lagged mainly because traditional Chinese medicine practitioners need to perform syndrome differentiation as well as biomedical disease diagnosis before a treatment decision can be made. Syndrome, a concept unique to traditional Chinese medicine, is an abstraction of a variety of signs and symptoms. The fact that the relationship between diseases and syndromes is not one-to-one but rather many-to-many makes it very challenging for a machine to perform syndrome predictions. So far, only a handful of artificial intelligence–based assistive traditional Chinese medicine diagnostic models have been reported, and they are limited in application to a single disease-type.ObjectiveThe objective was to develop an artificial intelligence–based assistive diagnostic system capable of diagnosing multiple types of diseases that are common in traditional Chinese medicine, given a patient’s electronic health record notes. The system was designed to simultaneously diagnose the disease and produce a list of corresponding syndromes.MethodsUnstructured freestyle electronic health record notes were processed by natural language processing techniques to extract clinical information such as signs and symptoms which were represented by named entities. Natural language processing used a recurrent neural network model called bidirectional long short-term memory network–conditional random forest. A convolutional neural network was then used to predict the disease-type out of 187 diseases in traditional Chinese medicine. A novel traditional Chinese medicine syndrome prediction method—an integrated learning model—was used to produce a corresponding list of probable syndromes. By following a majority-rule voting method, the integrated learning model for syndrome prediction can take advantage of four existing prediction methods (back propagation, random forest, extreme gradient boosting, and support vector classifier) while avoiding their respective weaknesses which resulted in a consistently high prediction accuracy.ResultsA data set consisting of 22,984 electronic health records from Guanganmen Hospital of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences that were collected between January 1, 2017 and September 7, 2018 was used. The data set contained a total of 187 diseases that are commonly diagnosed in traditional Chinese medicine. The diagnostic system was designed to be able to detect any one of the 187 disease-types. The data set was partitioned into a training set, a validation set, and a testing set in a ratio of 8:1:1. Test results suggested that the proposed system had a good diagnostic accuracy and a strong capability for generalization. The disease-type prediction accuracies of the top one, top three, and top five were 80.5%, 91.6%, and 94.2%, respectively.ConclusionsThe main contributions of the artificial intelligence–based traditional Chinese medicine assistive diagnostic system proposed in this paper are that 187 commonly known traditional Chinese medicine diseases can be diagnosed and a novel prediction method called an integrated learning model is demonstrated. This new prediction method outperformed all four existing methods in our preliminary experimental results. With further improvement of the algorithms and the availability of additional electronic health record data, it is expected that a wider range of traditional Chinese medicine disease-types could be diagnosed and that better diagnostic accuracies could be achieved.

When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures

AbstractIn democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in which individuals with conflicting preferences need to make a collective decision. They judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. We experimentally manipulated whether the group contains a vulnerable minority – a smaller number of people with more at stake than the majority. In all five countries, participants generally preferred voting without a vulnerable minority, with relatively greater support for voting in more democratic countries. But, when the group included a vulnerable minority, participants in all countries reduced their support for voting and instead preferred consensus.

A novel spectral–spatial based adaptive minimum spanning forest for hyperspectral image classification

The classification methods based on minimum spanning forest (MSF) have yielded impressive results for hyperspectral image. However, previous methods exist several drawbacks, i.e., marker selection methods are easily affected by boundary noise pixels, dissimilarity measure methods between pixels are inaccurate, and also image segmentation process is not robust, since they have not effectively utilized spatial information. To this end, in this paper, novel gradient-based marker selection technique, dissimilarity measures, and adaptive connection weighting method are proposed by making full use of spatial information in hyperspectral image. Concretely, for a given hyperspectral image, a pixel-wise classification is firstly performed, and meanwhile the gradient map is generated by a morphology-based algorithm. Secondly, the most reliable pixels are selected as the markers from the classification map, and then the boundary noise pixels are excluded from the marker map by using the gradient map. Thirdly, several new dissimilarity measures are proposed by incorporating gradient information or probability information of pixels. Furthermore, in the growth procedure of MSF, the connection weighting between pixels is adjusted adaptively to improve the robustness of the MSF algorithm. Finally, when building the final classification map by using the majority voting rule, the labels of the training samples are used to dominate the label prediction. Experimental results are performed on two hyperspectral image sets Indian Pines and University of Pavia with different resolutions and contexts. The proposed approach yields higher classification accuracies compared to previously proposed classification methods, and provides accurate segmentation maps.

Do Judicial Review Theories Ground Majority Rule in Constitutional Courts?

In this article, I challenge constitutional courts’ use of a majority voting rule (hereinafter “majority rule”) to declare statutes unconstitutional from the standpoint of the prevalent theories of judicial review. Put differently, in this article, I examine whether the main theories of judicial review provide conclusive or definitive reasons for using majority rule over other voting rules to scrutinize the constitutionality of legislation. After reviewing these theories, I conclude that none of them provides such reasons. This conclusion is relevant since it suggests that neither democratic theory nor constitutional theory suffices to ground majority rule in judicial review. In turn, this means that there is a rather wide space to explore whether constitutional courts should use other voting rules—such as unanimity rule and supermajority rules—to control the constitutionality of statutes.

Weighted voting on the blockchain: Improving consensus in proof of stake protocols

SummaryProof of stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain. Yet these protocols remain vulnerable to faults caused by validators who abstain either accidentally or maliciously. To protect against such faults while retaining the PoS selection and reward allocation schemes, we study weighted voting in validator committees. We formalize the block creation process and introduce validators' voting profiles which we update by a multiplicative weights algorithm relative to validators' voting behavior and aggregate blockchain rewards. Using this framework, we leverage weighted majority voting rules that optimize collective decision making to show, both numerically and analytically, that the consensus mechanism is more robust if validators' votes are appropriately scaled. We raise potential issues and limitations of weighted voting in trustless, decentralized networks and relate our results to the design of current PoS protocols.

Comparative performance of convolutional neural network, weighted and conventional support vector machine and random forest for classifying tree species using hyperspectral and photogrammetric data

ABSTRACT The classification of tree species can significantly benefit from high spatial and spectral information acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) associated with advanced classification methods. This study investigated the following topics concerning the classification of 16 tree species in two subtropical forest fragments of Southern Brazil: i) the potential integration of UAV-borne hyperspectral images with 3D information derived from their photogrammetric point cloud (PPC); ii) the performance of two machine learning methods (support vector machine – SVM and random forest – RF) when employing different datasets at a pixel and individual tree crown (ITC) levels; iii) the potential of two methods for dealing with the imbalanced sample set problem: a new weighted SVM (wSVM) approach, which attributes different weights to each sample and class, and a deep learning classifier (convolutional neural network – CNN), associated with a previous step to balance the sample set; and finally, iv) the potential of this last classifier for tree species classification as compared to the above mentioned machine learning methods. Results showed that the inclusion of the PPC features to the hyperspectral data provided a great accuracy increase in tree species classification results when conventional machine learning methods were applied, between 13 and 17% depending on the classifier and the study area characteristics. When using the PPC features and the canopy height model (CHM), associated with the majority vote (MV) rule, the SVM, wSVM and RF classifiers reached accuracies similar to the CNN, which outperformed these classifiers for both areas when considering the pixel-based classifications (overall accuracy of 84.4% in Area 1, and 74.95% in Area 2). The CNN was between 22% and 26% more accurate than the SVM and RF when only the hyperspectral bands were employed. The wSVM provided a slight increase in accuracy not only for some lesser represented classes, but also some major classes in Area 2. While conventional machine learning methods are faster, they demonstrated to be less stable to changes in datasets, depending on prior segmentation and hand-engineered features to reach similar accuracies to those attained by the CNN. To date, CNNs have been barely explored for the classification of tree species, and CNN-based classifications in the literature have not dealt with hyperspectral data specifically focusing on tropical environments. This paper thus presents innovative strategies for classifying tree species in subtropical forest areas at a refined legend level, integrating UAV-borne 2D hyperspectral and 3D photogrammetric data and relying on both deep and conventional machine learning approaches.