Diversity-Based Random Forests with Sample Weight Learning

Given a variety of classifiers, one prevalent approach in classifier ensemble is to diversely combine classifier components, i.e., diversity-based ensembles, and a lot of previous works show that these ensembles can improve classification accuracy. Random forests are one of the most important ensembles. However, most random forests approaches with diversity-related aspects focus on maximizing tree diversity while producing and training component trees. Alternatively, a novel cognitive-inspired diversity-based random forests method, diversity-based random forests via sample weight learning (DRFS), is proposed. Given numerous component trees from the original random forests, DRFS selects and combines tree classifiers adaptively via diversity learning and sample weight learning. By designing a matrix for the data distribution creatively, a unified optimization model is formulated to learn and select diverse trees, where tree weights are learned through a convex quadratic programming problem with sample weights. Moreover, a self-training algorithm is proposed to solve the convex optimization iteratively and learn sample weights automatically. Comparative experiments on 39 typical UCI classification benchmarks and a variety of real-world text categorization benchmarks of our proposed method are conducted. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the traditional methods. Our proposed DRFS method can select and combine tree classifiers adaptively and improves the performance on a variety of classification tasks.