Toward dynamic ensembles: the BAGA approach

Summary form only given. Existing studies on ensemble classifiers typically take a static approach in assembling individual classifiers, in which all the important features are specified in advance. In this paper, we propose a new concept, dynamic ensemble, as an advanced classifier that could have dynamic component classifiers and have dynamic configurations. Toward this goal, we have substantially expanded the existing "overproduce and choose" paradigm for ensemble construction. A new algorithm called BAGA is proposed to explore this approach. Taking a set of decision tree component classifiers as input, BAGA generates a set of candidate ensembles using combined bagging and genetic algorithm techniques so that component classifiers are determined at execution time. Empirical studies have been carried out on variations of the BAGA algorithm, where the sizes of chosen classifiers, effects of bag size, voting function and evaluation functions on the dynamic ensemble construction, are investigated.