Impact of the learners diversity and combination method on the generation of heterogeneous classifier ensembles

Abstract Ensembles of classifiers is a proven approach in machine learning with a wide variety of research works. The main issue in ensembles of classifiers is not only the selection of the base classifiers, but also the combination of their outputs. According to the literature, it has been established that much is to be gained from combining classifiers if those classifiers are accurate and diverse. However, it is still an open issue how to define the relation between accuracy and diversity in order to define the best possible ensemble of classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to evaluate the impact of the diversity of the learners on the generation of heterogeneous ensembles. We present an exhaustive study of this approach using 27 different multiclass datasets and analysing their results in detail. In addition, to determine the performance of the different results, the presence of labelling noise is also considered.