Cluster-based ensemble of classifiers

This paper presents cluster-based ensemble classifier – an approach toward generating ensemble of classifiers using multiple clusters within classified data. Clustering is incorporated to partition data set into multiple clusters of highly correlated data that are difficult to separate otherwise and different base classifiers are used to learn class boundaries within the clusters. As the different base classifiers engage on different difficult-to-classify subsets of the data, the learning of the base classifiers is more focussed and accurate. A selection rather than fusion approach achieves the final verdict on patterns of unknown classes. The impact of clustering on the learning parameters and accuracy of a number of learning algorithms including neural network, support vector machine, decision tree and k-NN classifier is investigated. A number of benchmark data sets from the UCI machine learning repository were used to evaluate the cluster-based ensemble classifier and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority over bagging and boosting.