EBOC: Ensemble-Based Ordinal Classification in Transportation

Learning the latent patterns of historical data in an efficient way to model the behaviour of a system is a major need for making right decisions. For this purpose, machine learning solution has already begun its promising marks in transportation as well as in many areas such as marketing, finance, education, and health. However, many classification algorithms in the literature assume that the target attribute values in the datasets are unordered, so they lose inherent order between the class values. To overcome the problem, this study proposes a novel ensemble-based ordinal classification (EBOC) approach which suggests bagging and boosting (AdaBoost algorithm) methods as a solution for ordinal classification problem in transportation sector. This article also compares the proposed EBOC approach with ordinal class classifier and traditional tree-based classification algorithms (i.e., C4.5 decision tree, RandomTree, and REPTree) in terms of accuracy. The results indicate that the proposed EBOC approach achieves better classification performance than the conventional solutions.