When Does Diversity Help Generalization in Classification Ensembles?

Ensembles, as a widely used and effective technique in the machine learning community, succeed within a key element—“diversity.” The relationship between diversity and generalization, unfortunately, is not entirely understood and remains an open research issue. To reveal the effect of diversity on the generalization of classification ensembles, we investigate three issues on diversity, that is, the measurement of diversity, the relationship between the proposed diversity and the generalization error, and the utilization of this relationship for ensemble pruning. In the diversity measurement, we measure diversity by error decomposition inspired by regression ensembles, which decompose the error of classification ensembles into accuracy and diversity. Then, we formulate the relationship between the measured diversity and ensemble performance through the theorem of margin and generalization and observe that the generalization error is reduced effectively only when the measured diversity is increased in a few specific ranges, while in other ranges, larger diversity is less beneficial to increasing the generalization of an ensemble. Besides, we propose two pruning methods based on diversity management to utilize this relationship, which could increase diversity appropriately and shrink the size of the ensemble without much-decreasing performance. The empirical results validate the reasonableness of the proposed relationship between diversity and ensemble generalization error and the effectiveness of the proposed pruning methods.