Ensemble methods for noise elimination in classification problems

Abstract

Ensemble methods combine a set of classifiers to construct a new classifier that is (often) more accurate than any of its component classifiers. In this paper, we use ensemble methods to identify noisy training examples. More precisely, we consider the problem of mislabeled training examples in classification tasks, and address this problem by pre-processing the training set, i.e. by identifying and removing outliers from the training set. We study a number of filter techniques that are based on well-known ensemble methods like cross-validated committees, bagging and boosting. We evaluate these techniques in an Inductive Logic Programming setting and use a first order decision tree algorithm to construct the ensembles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.