Ensembles of Multilayer Feedforward: Some New Results

摘要

As shown in the bibliography, training an ensemble of networks is an interesting way to improve the performance with respect to a single network. However there are several methods to construct the ensemble. In this paper we present some new results in a comparison of twenty different methods. We have trained ensembles of 3, 9, 20 and 40 networks to show results in a wide spectrum of values. The results show that the improvement in performance above 9 networks in the ensemble depends on the method but it is usually low. Also, the best method for a ensemble of 3 networks is called "Decorrelated" and uses a penalty term in the usual Backpropagation function to decorrelate the network outputs in the ensemble. For the case of 9 and 20 networks the best method is conservative boosting. And finally for 40 networks the best method is Cels.