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Reducing the Overconfidence of Base Classifiers when Combining Their Decisions

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Multiple Classifier Systems (MCS 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2709))

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Abstract

When the sample size is small, the optimistically biased outputs produced by expert classifiers create serious problems for the combiner rule designer. To overcome these problems, we derive analytical expressions for bias reduction for situations when the standard Gaussian density-based quadratic classifiers serve as experts and the decisions of the base experts are aggregated by the behavior-space-knowledge (BKS) method. These reduction terms diminish the experts’ overconfidence and improve the multiple classification system’s generalization ability. The bias-reduction approach is compared with the standard BKS, majority voting and stacked generalization fusion rules on two real-life datasets for which the different base expert aggregates comprise the multiple classification system.

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Raudys, Š., Somorjai, R., Baumgartner, R. (2003). Reducing the Overconfidence of Base Classifiers when Combining Their Decisions. In: Windeatt, T., Roli, F. (eds) Multiple Classifier Systems. MCS 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2709. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44938-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44938-8_7

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40369-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44938-6

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