Evaluation of combination methods

This paper presents a new approach to evaluate the performances of combination methods, which takes into account both the recognition rates of the experts combined and the correlation among them. At the purpose, a suitable estimator of correlation is defined. Two combination methods have been considered: majority vote and Dempster Shafer. A statistical test, based on the analysis of variance, has also been used to infer some interesting considerations on the behaviour of combination methods. The paper shows how the proposed approach allows the selection of the best combination method for each set of experts.