• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.139-157
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• 2016

Bankruptcy involves considerable costs, so it can have significant effects on a country's economy. Thus, bankruptcy prediction is an important issue. Over the past several decades, many researchers have addressed topics associated with bankruptcy prediction. Early research on bankruptcy prediction employed conventional statistical methods such as univariate analysis, discriminant analysis, multiple regression, and logistic regression. Later on, many studies began utilizing artificial intelligence techniques such as inductive learning, neural networks, and case-based reasoning. Currently, ensemble models are being utilized to enhance the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction. Ensemble classification involves combining multiple classifiers to obtain more accurate predictions than those obtained using individual models. Ensemble learning techniques are known to be very useful for improving the generalization ability of the classifier. Base classifiers in the ensemble must be as accurate and diverse as possible in order to enhance the generalization ability of an ensemble model. Commonly used methods for constructing ensemble classifiers include bagging, boosting, and random subspace. The random subspace method selects a random feature subset for each classifier from the original feature space to diversify the base classifiers of an ensemble. Each ensemble member is trained by a randomly chosen feature subspace from the original feature set, and predictions from each ensemble member are combined by an aggregation method. The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifier is robust with respect to variations in the dataset but is very sensitive to changes in the feature space. For this reason, KNN is a good classifier for the random subspace method. The KNN random subspace ensemble model has been shown to be very effective for improving an individual KNN model. The k parameter of KNN base classifiers and selected feature subsets for base classifiers play an important role in determining the performance of the KNN ensemble model. However, few studies have focused on optimizing the k parameter and feature subsets of base classifiers in the ensemble. This study proposed a new ensemble method that improves upon the performance KNN ensemble model by optimizing both k parameters and feature subsets of base classifiers. A genetic algorithm was used to optimize the KNN ensemble model and improve the prediction accuracy of the ensemble model. The proposed model was applied to a bankruptcy prediction problem by using a real dataset from Korean companies. The research data included 1800 externally non-audited firms that filed for bankruptcy (900 cases) or non-bankruptcy (900 cases). Initially, the dataset consisted of 134 financial ratios. Prior to the experiments, 75 financial ratios were selected based on an independent sample t-test of each financial ratio as an input variable and bankruptcy or non-bankruptcy as an output variable. Of these, 24 financial ratios were selected by using a logistic regression backward feature selection method. The complete dataset was separated into two parts: training and validation. The training dataset was further divided into two portions: one for the training model and the other to avoid overfitting. The prediction accuracy against this dataset was used to determine the fitness value in order to avoid overfitting. The validation dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the final model. A 10-fold cross-validation was implemented to compare the performances of the proposed model and other models. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, the classification accuracy of the proposed model was compared with that of other models. The Q-statistic values and average classification accuracies of base classifiers were investigated. The experimental results showed that the proposed model outperformed other models, such as the single model and random subspace ensemble model.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.12
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• pp.1260-1270
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• 2005

Support Vector Machines (SVM) is well known for a representative learner as one of the kernel methods. SVM which is based on the statistical learning theory shows good generalization performance and has been applied to various pattern recognition problems. However, SVM is basically to deal with a two-class classification problem, so we cannot solve directly a multi-class problem with a binary SVM. One-Per-Class (OPC) and All-Pairs have been applied to solve the face recognition problem, which is one of the multi-class problems, with SVM. The two methods above are ones of the output coding methods, a general approach for solving multi-class problem with multiple binary classifiers, which decomposes a complex multi-class problem into a set of binary problems and then reconstructs the outputs of binary classifiers for each binary problem. In this paper, we introduce the output coding methods as an approach for extending binary SVM to multi-class SVM and propose new output coding schemes based on the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) which is a dominant theoretical foundation of the output coding methods. From the experiment on the face recognition, we give empirical results on the properties of output coding methods including our proposed ones.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.133-145
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• 2004

Combining multiple classifiers to obtain improved performance over the individual classifier has been a widely used technique. The task of constructing a multiple classifier system(MCS) contains two different issues : how to generate a diverse set of base-level classifiers and how to combine their predictions. In this paper, we review the characteristics of the existing multiple classifier systems: bagging, boosting, and stacking. And then we propose new MCSs: stacked bagging, stacked boosting, bagged stacking, and boasted stacking. These MCSs are a sort of hybrid MCSs that combine advantageous characteristics of the existing ones. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes, we conducted experiments with nine different real-world datasets from UCI KDD archive. The result of experiments showed the superiority of our hybrid MCSs, especially bagged stacking and boosted stacking, over the existing ones.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.192-201
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• 2002

Automated text classification is considered as an important method to manage and process a huge amount of documents in digital forms that are widespread and continuously increasing. Recently, text classification has been addressed with machine learning technologies such as k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, support vector machine and neural networks. However, only few investigations in text classification are studied on real problems but on well-organized text corpus, and do not show their usefulness. This paper proposes and analyzes text classification methods for a real application, email document classification task. First, we propose a combining method of multiple neural networks that improves the performance through the combinations with maximum and neural networks. Second, we present another strategy of combining multiple machine learning classifiers. Voting, Borda count and neural networks improve the overall classification performance. Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed methods for a real application domain, yielding more than 90% precision rates.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.5
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• pp.545-554
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• 2004

Combining multiple classifiers to obtain improved performance over the individual classifier has been a widely used technique. The task of constructing a multiple classifier system(MCS) contains two different Issues how to generate a diverse set of base-level classifiers and how to combine their predictions. In this paper, we review the characteristics of existing multiple classifier systems : Bagging, Boosting, and Slaking. For document classification, we propose new MCSs such as Stacked Bagging, Stacked Boosting, Bagged Stacking, Boosted Stacking. These MCSs are a sort of hybrid MCSs that combine advantages of existing MCSs such as Bugging, Boosting, and Stacking. We conducted some experiments of document classification to evaluate the performances of the proposed schemes on MEDLINE, Usenet news, and Web document collections. The result of experiments demonstrate the superiority of our hybrid MCSs over the existing ones.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.99-112
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• 2010

Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. It is a method for finding a highly accurateclassifier on the training set by constructing and combining an ensemble of weak classifiers, each of which needs only to be moderately accurate on the training set. Ensemble learning has received considerable attention from machine learning and artificial intelligence fields because of its remarkable performance improvement and flexible integration with the traditional learning algorithms such as decision tree (DT), neural networks (NN), and SVM, etc. In those researches, all of DT ensemble studies have demonstrated impressive improvements in the generalization behavior of DT, while NN and SVM ensemble studies have not shown remarkable performance as shown in DT ensembles. Recently, several works have reported that the performance of ensemble can be degraded where multiple classifiers of an ensemble are highly correlated with, and thereby result in multicollinearity problem, which leads to performance degradation of the ensemble. They have also proposed the differentiated learning strategies to cope with performance degradation problem. Hansen and Salamon (1990) insisted that it is necessary and sufficient for the performance enhancement of an ensemble that the ensemble should contain diverse classifiers. Breiman (1996) explored that ensemble learning can increase the performance of unstable learning algorithms, but does not show remarkable performance improvement on stable learning algorithms. Unstable learning algorithms such as decision tree learners are sensitive to the change of the training data, and thus small changes in the training data can yield large changes in the generated classifiers. Therefore, ensemble with unstable learning algorithms can guarantee some diversity among the classifiers. To the contrary, stable learning algorithms such as NN and SVM generate similar classifiers in spite of small changes of the training data, and thus the correlation among the resulting classifiers is very high. This high correlation results in multicollinearity problem, which leads to performance degradation of the ensemble. Kim,s work (2009) showedthe performance comparison in bankruptcy prediction on Korea firms using tradition prediction algorithms such as NN, DT, and SVM. It reports that stable learning algorithms such as NN and SVM have higher predictability than the unstable DT. Meanwhile, with respect to their ensemble learning, DT ensemble shows the more improved performance than NN and SVM ensemble. Further analysis with variance inflation factor (VIF) analysis empirically proves that performance degradation of ensemble is due to multicollinearity problem. It also proposes that optimization of ensemble is needed to cope with such a problem. This paper proposes a hybrid system for coverage optimization of NN ensemble (CO-NN) in order to improve the performance of NN ensemble. Coverage optimization is a technique of choosing a sub-ensemble from an original ensemble to guarantee the diversity of classifiers in coverage optimization process. CO-NN uses GA which has been widely used for various optimization problems to deal with the coverage optimization problem. The GA chromosomes for the coverage optimization are encoded into binary strings, each bit of which indicates individual classifier. The fitness function is defined as maximization of error reduction and a constraint of variance inflation factor (VIF), which is one of the generally used methods to measure multicollinearity, is added to insure the diversity of classifiers by removing high correlation among the classifiers. We use Microsoft Excel and the GAs software package called Evolver. Experiments on company failure prediction have shown that CO-NN is effectively applied in the stable performance enhancement of NNensembles through the choice of classifiers by considering the correlations of the ensemble. The classifiers which have the potential multicollinearity problem are removed by the coverage optimization process of CO-NN and thereby CO-NN has shown higher performance than a single NN classifier and NN ensemble at 1% significance level, and DT ensemble at 5% significance level. However, there remain further research issues. First, decision optimization process to find optimal combination function should be considered in further research. Secondly, various learning strategies to deal with data noise should be introduced in more advanced further researches in the future.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.45-59
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• 2016

An ensemble classifier is a method that combines output of multiple classifiers. It has been widely accepted that ensemble classifiers can improve the prediction accuracy. Recently, ensemble techniques have been successfully applied to the bankruptcy prediction. Bagging and random subspace are the most popular ensemble techniques. Bagging and random subspace have proved to be very effective in improving the generalization ability respectively. However, there are few studies which have focused on the integration of bagging and random subspace. In this study, we proposed a new hybrid ensemble model to integrate bagging and random subspace method using genetic algorithm for improving the performance of the model. The proposed model is applied to the bankruptcy prediction for Korean companies and compared with other models in this study. The experimental results showed that the proposed model performs better than the other models such as the single classifier, the original ensemble model and the simple hybrid model.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.255-264
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• 2016

Classification is a predictive modeling for a categorical target variable. Various classification ensemble methods, which predict with better accuracy by combining multiple classifiers, became a powerful machine learning and data mining paradigm. Well-known methodologies of classification ensemble are boosting, bagging and random forest. In this article, we assume that decision trees are used as classifiers in the ensemble. Further, we hypothesized that tree size affects classification accuracy. To study how the tree size in uences accuracy, we performed experiments using twenty-eight data sets. Then we compare the performances of ensemble algorithms; bagging, double-bagging, boosting and random forest, with different tree sizes in the experiment.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.451-455
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• 2008

In this paper, the k-nearest templates method is proposed to combine multiple classifiers effectively. First, the method decomposes training samples of each class into several subclasses based on the outputs of classifiers to represent a class as multiple models, and estimates a localized template by averaging the outputs for each subclass. The distances between a test sample and templates are then calculated. Lastly, the test sample is assigned to the class that is most frequently represented among the k most similar templates. In this paper, C-means clustering algorithm is used as the decomposition method, and k is automatically chosen according to the intra-class compactness and inter-class separation of a given data set. Since the proposed method uses multiple models per class and refers to k models rather than matches with the most similar one, it could obtain stable and high accuracy. In this paper, experiments on UCI and ELENA database showed that the proposed method performed better than conventional fusion methods.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.289-293
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• 2005

Pattern classification extracts various types of pattern information expressing objects in the real world and decides their class. The top priority of pattern classification technologies is to improve the performance of classification and, for this, many researches have tried various approaches for the last 40 years. Classification methods used in pattern classification include base classifier based on the probabilistic inference of patterns, decision tree, method based on distance function, neural network and clustering but they are not efficient in analyzing a large amount of multi-dimensional data. Thus, there are active researches on multiple classifier systems, which improve the performance of classification by combining problems using a number of mutually compensatory classifiers. The present study identifies problems in previous researches on multiple SVM classifiers, and proposes BORSE, a model that, based on 1:M policy in order to expand SVM to a multiple class classifier, regards each SVM output as a signal with non-linear pattern, trains the neural network for the pattern and combine the final results of classification performance.