Evolved Decision Trees as Conformal Predictors
2013 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
In conformal prediction, predictive models output
sets of predictions with a bound on the error rate. In classification,
this translates to that the probability of excluding the
correct class is lower than a predefined significance level, in the
long run. Since the error rate is guaranteed, the most important
criterion for conformal predictors is efficiency. Efficient conformal
predictors minimize the number of elements in the output
prediction sets, thus producing more informative predictions.
This paper presents one of the first comprehensive studies where
evolutionary algorithms are used to build conformal predictors.
More specifically, decision trees evolved using genetic programming
are evaluated as conformal predictors. In the experiments,
the evolved trees are compared to decision trees induced using
standard machine learning techniques on 33 publicly available
benchmark data sets, with regard to predictive performance and
efficiency. The results show that the evolved trees are generally
more accurate, and the corresponding conformal predictors more
efficient, than their induced counterparts. One important result
is that the probability estimates of decision trees when used as
conformal predictors should be smoothed, here using the Laplace
correction. Finally, using the more discriminating Brier score
instead of accuracy as the optimization criterion produced the
most efficient conformal predictions.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE , 2013.
Keywords [en]
Conformal prediction, Genetic programming, Data mining, Machine Learning
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-7053DOI: 10.1109/CEC.2013.6557778ISI: 000326235301102Local ID: 2320/12919ISBN: 978-1-4799-0453-2 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hb-7053DiVA, id: diva2:887760
Conference
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 20-23 June 2013
Note
Sponsorship:
Swedish Foundation
for Strategic Research through the project High-Performance
Data Mining for Drug Effect Detection (IIS11-0053) and the
Knowledge Foundation through the project Big Data Analytics
by Online Ensemble Learning (20120192).
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