Optimized consensus theory

Statistical classification methods based on consensus from several data sources are considered. The methods need weighting mechanisms to control the influence of each data source in the combined classification. The weights are optimized in order to improve the combined classification accuracies. Both linear and non-linear methods are considered for the optimization. A non-linear method which utilizes a neural network is proposed and gives excellent results in experiments. Consensus theory optimized with neural networks outperforms all other methods both in terms of training and test accuracies in the experiments