An evidential approach in ensembles

In this paper, we describe an approach to modeling the general process of combining decisions involved in ensembles of classifiers as an evidential reasoning process. This work proposes a novel structure, theoretical properties and manipulation mechanisms for representing classifier decisions as pieces of evidence. The advantage of the representation formalism is that it not only facilitates the distinguishing of trivial focal elements from important ones, resulting in the improvement of the ensemble performance, but it also effectively reduces the computation-time from exponential (as required in the conventional process of combining multiple pieces of evidence) to linear. We have conducted a comparative analysis on the effectiveness of the proposed evidence representation formalism in the text categorization domain. By comparing this method with majority voting and the previous results, we also demonstrate the advantage of this novel approach in combining classifiers.