Relationship between Diversity and Perfomance of Multiple Classifiers for Decision Support

The paper presents the investigation and implementation of the relationship between diversity and the performance of multiple classifiers on classification accuracy. The study is critical as to build classifiers that are strong and can generalize better. The parameters of the neural network within the committee were varied to induce diversity; hence structural diversity is the focus for this study. The hidden nodes and the activation function are the parameters that were varied. The diversity measures that were adopted from ecology such as Shannon and Simpson were used to quantify diversity. Genetic algorithm is used to find the optimal ensemble by using the accuracy as the cost function. The results observed shows that there is a relationship between structural diversity and accuracy. It is observed that the classification accuracy of an ensemble increases as the diversity increases. There was an increase of 3%-6% in the classification accuracy.