Neural network ensembles based on Artificial Training Examples

Ensembles with several neural networks are widely used to improve the generalization performance over a single network. Proper diversity among component networks is considered an important parameter for ensemble construction so that failure of one may be compensated by others. Data sampling, i.e., different training sets for different networks, is the most investigated technique for diversity than other approaches. This paper presents a data sampling based neural network ensemble method where individual networks are trained on the union of original training set and a set of some artificially generated examples. Generated examples are different for different networks and are the element to produce diversity among the networks. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated on a suite of 20 benchmark classification problems. The experimental results show that the performance of this ensemble method is better or competitive with respect to the existing popular methods.