Bagging of Credal Decision Trees for Imprecise Classification

Abstract

The Credal Decision Trees (CDT) have been adapted for Imprecise Classification (ICDT). However, no ensembles of imprecise classifiers have been proposed so far. The reason might be that it is not a trivial question to combine the predictions made by multiple imprecise classifier. In fact, if the combination method used is not appropriate, the ensemble method could even worse the performance of one single classifier. On the other hand, the Bagging scheme has shown to provide satisfactory results in precise classification, specially when it is used with CDTs, which are known to be very weak and unstable classifiers. For these reasons, in this research, it is proposed a new Bagging scheme with ICDTs. It is presented a new technique for combining predictions made by imprecise classifiers that tries to maximize the precision of the bagging classifier. If the procedure for such a combination is too conservative it is easy to obtain few information and worse the results of a single classifier. Our proposal considers only the states with the minimum level of non-dominance. An exhaustive experimentation carried out in this work has shown that the Bagging of ICDTs, with our proposed combination technique, performs clearly better than a single ICDT.