Divide, Specialize, and Route: A New Approach to Efficient Ensemble Learning

Ensemble learning has proven effective in boosting predictive performance, but traditional methods such as bagging, boosting, and dynamic ensemble selection (DES) suffer from high computational cost and limited adaptability to heterogeneous data distributions. To address these limitations, we propose Hellsemble, a novel and interpretable ensemble framework for binary classification that leverages dataset complexity during both training and inference. Hellsemble incrementally partitions the dataset into circles of difficulty by iteratively passing misclassified instances from simpler models to subsequent ones, forming a committee of specialised base learners. Each model is trained on increasingly challenging subsets, while a separate router model learns to assign new instances to the most suitable base model based on inferred difficulty. Hellsemble achieves strong classification accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency and interpretability. Experimental results on OpenML-CC18 and Tabzilla benchmarks demonstrate that Hellsemble often outperforms classical ensemble methods. Our findings suggest that embracing instance-level difficulty offers a promising direction for constructing efficient and robust ensemble systems.