What are the Benefits of Ensemble Methods for Machine Learning? Ensembles are predictive models that combine predictions from two or more other models. Ensemble learning methods are popular and the go-to technique when the best performance on a predictive modeling project is the most important outcome. Nevertheless, they are not always the most appropriate technique […]
Many decisions we make in life are based on the opinions of multiple other people. This includes choosing a book to read based on reviews, choosing a course of action based on the advice of multiple medical doctors, and determining guilt. Often, decision making by a group of individuals results in a better outcome than […]
Ensemble learning involves combining the predictions from multiple machine learning models. The effect can be both improved predictive performance and lower variance of the predictions made by the model. Ensemble methods are covered in most textbooks on machine learning; nevertheless, there are books dedicated to the topic. In this post, you will discover the top […]
The Gradient Boosting Machine is a powerful ensemble machine learning algorithm that uses decision trees. Boosting is a general ensemble technique that involves sequentially adding models to the ensemble where subsequent models correct the performance of prior models. AdaBoost was the first algorithm to deliver on the promise of boosting. Gradient boosting is a generalization […]
Boosting is a class of ensemble machine learning algorithms that involve combining the predictions from many weak learners. A weak learner is a model that is very simple, although has some skill on the dataset. Boosting was a theoretical concept long before a practical algorithm could be developed, and the AdaBoost (adaptive boosting) algorithm was […]
Bagging is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that combines the predictions from many decision trees. It is also easy to implement given that it has few key hyperparameters and sensible heuristics for configuring these hyperparameters. Bagging performs well in general and provides the basis for a whole field of ensemble of decision tree algorithms such […]
Extra Trees is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that combines the predictions from many decision trees. It is related to the widely used random forest algorithm. It can often achieve as-good or better performance than the random forest algorithm, although it uses a simpler algorithm to construct the decision trees used as members of the […]
Random forest is an ensemble machine learning algorithm. It is perhaps the most popular and widely used machine learning algorithm given its good or excellent performance across a wide range of classification and regression predictive modeling problems. It is also easy to use given that it has few key hyperparameters and sensible heuristics for configuring […]
Voting is an ensemble machine learning algorithm. For regression, a voting ensemble involves making a prediction that is the average of multiple other regression models. In classification, a hard voting ensemble involves summing the votes for crisp class labels from other models and predicting the class with the most votes. A soft voting ensemble involves […]
Not all classification predictive models support multi-class classification. Algorithms such as the Perceptron, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machines were designed for binary classification and do not natively support classification tasks with more than two classes. One approach for using binary classification algorithms for multi-classification problems is to split the multi-class classification dataset into multiple […]
