An Empirical Comparison of Bagging, Boosting and Support Vector Machine Classifiers in Data Mining

The goal of this paper is to compare classification performances and to find a better classifier based on the characteristics of data. The compared methods are CART with two ensemble algorithms, bagging or boosting and SVM. In the empirical study of twenty-eight data sets, we found that SVM has smaller error rate than the other methods in most of data sets. When comparing bagging, boosting and SVM based on the characteristics of data, SVM algorithm is suitable to the data with small numbers of observation and no missing values. On the other hand, boosting algorithm is suitable to the data with number of observation and bagging algorithm is suitable to the data with missing values.