Feature vs. classifier fusion for predictive data mining a case study in pesticide classification

Two strategies for fusing information from multiple sources when generating predictive models in the domain of pesticide classification are investigated: i) fusing different sets of features (molecular descriptors) before building a model and ii) fusing the classifiers built from the individual descriptor sets. An empirical investigation demonstrates that the choice of strategy can have a significant impact on the predictive performance. Furthermore, the experiment shows that the best strategy is dependent on the type of predictive model considered. When generating a decision tree for pesticide classification, a statistically significant difference in accuracy is observed in favor of combining predictions from the individual models compared to generating a single model from the fused set of molecular descriptors. On the other hand, when the model consists of an ensemble of decision trees, a statistically significant difference in accuracy is observed in favor of building the model from the fused set of descriptors compared to fusing ensemble models built from the individual sources.