A DEEP analysis of the META-DES framework for dynamic selection of ensemble of classifiers

Abstract: Dynamic ensemble selection (DES) techniques work by estimating the level of competence of each classifier from a pool of classifiers. Only the most competent ones are selected to classify a given test sample. Hence, the key issue in DES is the criterion used to estimate the level of competence of the classifiers in predicting the label of a given test sample. In order to perform a more robust ensemble selection, we proposed the META-DES framework using meta-learning, where multiple criteria are encoded as meta-features and are passed down to a meta-classifier that is trained to estimate the competence level of a given classifier. In this technical report, we present a step-by-step analysis of each phase of the framework during training and test. We show how each set of meta-features is extracted as well as their impact on the estimation of the competence level of the base classifier. Moreover, an analysis of the impact of several factors in the system performance, such as the number of classifiers in the pool, the use of different linear base classifiers, as well as the size of the validation data. We show that using the dynamic selection of linear classifiers through the META-DES framework, we can solve complex non-linear classification problems where other combination techniques such as AdaBoost cannot.