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Credit scoring is important for financial institutions in order to accurately predict the likelihood of business failure. Related studies have shown that machine learning techniques, such as neural networks, outperform many statistical approaches to solving this type of problem, and advanced machine learning techniques, such as classifier ensembles and hybrid classifiers, provide better prediction performance than single machine learning based classification techniques. However, it is not known which type of advanced classification technique performs better in terms of financial distress prediction. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper compares neural network ensembles and hybrid neural networks over three benchmarking credit scoring related data sets, which are Australian, German, and Japanese data sets.

The experimental results show that hybrid neural networks and neural network ensembles outperform the single neural network. Although hybrid neural networks perform slightly better than neural network ensembles in terms of predication accuracy and errors with two of the data sets, there is no significant difference between the two types of prediction models.

The originality of this paper is in comparing two types of advanced classification techniques, i.e. hybrid and ensemble learning techniques, in terms of financial distress prediction.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the emotional state of a human being by capturing the speech utterances that are used during common conversation. Human beings except of thinking creatures are also sentimental and emotional organisms. There are six universal basic emotions plus a neutral emotion: happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust and neutral.

It is proved that, given enough acoustic evidence, the emotional state of a person can be classified by an ensemble majority voting classifier. The proposed ensemble classifier is constructed over three base classifiers: k nearest neighbors, C4.5 and support vector machine (SVM) polynomial kernel.

The proposed ensemble classifier achieves better performance than each base classifier. It is compared with two other ensemble classifiers: one-against-all (OAA) multiclass SVM with radial basis function kernels and OAA multiclass SVM with hybrid kernels. The proposed ensemble classifier achieves better performance than the other two ensemble classifiers.

The current paper performs emotion classification with an ensemble majority voting classifier that combines three certain types of base classifiers which are of low computational complexity. The base classifiers stem from different theoretical background to avoid bias and redundancy. It gives to the proposed ensemble classifier the ability to be generalized in the emotion domain space.

Ensemble models that combine multiple base classifiers have been widely used to improve prediction performance in credit risk evaluation. However, an arbitrary selection of base classifiers is problematic. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for selecting base classifiers to improve the overall classification performance of an ensemble model.

In this study, selecting base classifiers is treated as a feature selection problem, where the output from a base classifier can be considered a feature. The proposed correlation-based classifier selection using the maximum information coefficient (MIC-CCS), a correlation-based classifier selection under the maximum information coefficient method, selects the features (classifiers) using nonlinear optimization programming, which seeks to optimize the relationship between the accuracy and diversity of base classifiers, based on MIC.

The empirical results show that ensemble models perform better than stand-alone ones, whereas the ensemble model based on MIC-CCS outperforms the ensemble models with unselected base classifiers and other ensemble models based on traditional forward and backward selection methods. Additionally, the classification performance of the ensemble model in which correlation is measured with MIC is better than that measured with the Pearson correlation coefficient.

The study provides an alternate solution to effectively select base classifiers that are significantly different, so that they can provide complementary information and, as these selected classifiers have good predictive capabilities, the classification performance of the ensemble model is improved.

This paper introduces MIC to the correlation-based selection process to better capture nonlinear and nonfunctional relationships in a complex credit data structure and construct a novel nonlinear programming model for base classifiers selection that has not been used in other studies.

The immense quantity of available unstructured text documents serve as one of the largest source of information. Text classification can be an essential task for many purposes in information retrieval, such as document organization, text filtering and sentiment analysis. Ensemble learning has been extensively studied to construct efficient text classification schemes with higher predictive performance and generalization ability. The purpose of this paper is to provide diversity among the classification algorithms of ensemble, which is a key issue in the ensemble design.

An ensemble scheme based on hybrid supervised clustering is presented for text classification. In the presented scheme, supervised hybrid clustering, which is based on cuckoo search algorithm and k-means, is introduced to partition the data samples of each class into clusters so that training subsets with higher diversities can be provided. Each classifier is trained on the diversified training subsets and the predictions of individual classifiers are combined by the majority voting rule. The predictive performance of the proposed classifier ensemble is compared to conventional classification algorithms (such as Naïve Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machines and C4.5 algorithm) and ensemble learning methods (such as AdaBoost, bagging and random subspace) using 11 text benchmarks.

The experimental results indicate that the presented classifier ensemble outperforms the conventional classification algorithms and ensemble learning methods for text classification.

The presented ensemble scheme is the first to use supervised clustering to obtain diverse ensemble for text classification

A crucial decision in financial services is how to classify credit or loan applicants into good and bad applicants. The purpose of this paper is to propose a four-stage hybrid data mining approach to support the decision-making process.

The approach is inspired by the bagging ensemble learning method and proposes a new voting method, namely two-level majority voting in the last stage. First some training subsets are generated. Then some different base classifiers are tuned and afterward some ensemble methods are applied to strengthen tuned classifiers. Finally, two-level majority voting schemes help the approach to achieve more accuracy.

A comparison of results shows the proposed model outperforms powerful single classifiers such as multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine, logistic regression (LR). In addition, it is more accurate than ensemble learning methods such as bagging-LR or rotation forest (RF)-MLP. The model outperforms single classifiers in terms of type I and II errors; it is close to some ensemble approaches such as bagging-LR and RF-MLP but fails to outperform them in terms of type I and II errors. Moreover, majority voting in the final stage provides more reliable results.

The study concludes the approach would be beneficial for banks, credit card companies and other credit provider organisations.

A novel four stages hybrid approach inspired by bagging ensemble method proposed. Moreover the two-level majority voting in two different schemes in the last stage provides more accuracy. An integrated evaluation criterion for classification errors provides an enhanced insight for error comparisons.

Multiple classifier systems have been used widely in computing, communications, and informatics. Combining multiple classifier systems (MCS) has been shown to outperform a single classifier system. It has been demonstrated that improvement in ensemble performance depends on either the diversity among or the performance of individual systems. A variety of diversity measures and ensemble methods have been proposed and studied. However, it remains a challenging problem to estimate the ensemble performance in terms of the performance of and the diversity among individual systems. The purpose of this paper is to study the general problem of estimating ensemble performance for various combination methods using the concept of a performance distribution pattern (PDP).

In particular, the paper establishes upper and lower bounds for majority voting ensemble performance with disagreement diversity measure Dis, weighted majority voting performance in terms of weighted average performance and weighted disagreement diversity, and plurality voting ensemble performance with entropy diversity measure D.

Bounds for these three cases are shown to be tight using the PDP for the input set.

As a consequence of the authors' previous results on diversity equivalence, the results of majority voting ensemble performance can be extended to several other diversity measures. Moreover, the paper showed in the case of majority voting ensemble performance that when the average of individual systems performance P is big enough, the ensemble performance P^m resulting from a maximum (information‐theoretic) entropy PDP is an increasing function with respect to the disagreement diversity Dis. Eight experiments using data sets from various application domains are conducted to demonstrate the complexity, richness, and diverseness of the problem in estimating the ensemble performance.

Customer churn prediction is one of the most well-known approaches to manage and improve customer retention. Machine learning techniques, especially classification algorithms, are very popular tools to predict the churners. In this paper, three ensemble classifiers are proposed based on bagging and boosting for customer churn prediction.

In this paper, three ensemble classifiers are proposed based on bagging and boosting for customer churn prediction. The first classifier, which is called boosted bagging, uses boosting for each bagging sample. In this approach, before concluding the final results in a bagging algorithm, the authors try to improve the prediction by applying a boosting algorithm for each bootstrap sample. The second proposed ensemble classifier, which is called bagged bagging, combines bagging with itself. In the other words, the authors apply bagging for each sample of bagging algorithm. Finally, the third approach uses bagging of neural network with learning based on a genetic algorithm.

To examine the performance of all proposed ensemble classifiers, they are applied to two datasets. Numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed hybrid approaches outperform the simple bagging and boosting algorithms as well as base classifiers. Especially, bagged bagging provides high accuracy and precision results.

In this paper, three novel ensemble classifiers are proposed based on bagging and boosting for customer churn prediction. Not only the proposed approaches can be applied for customer churn prediction but also can be used for any other binary classification algorithms.

The internet has completely merged into contemporary life. People are addicted to using internet services for everyday activities. Consequently, an abundance of information about people and organizations is available online, which encourages the proliferation of cybercrimes. Cybercriminals often use malicious links for large-scale cyberattacks, which are disseminated via email, SMS and social media. Recognizing malicious links online can be exceedingly challenging. The purpose of this paper is to present a strong security system that can detect malicious links in the cyberspace using natural language processing technique.

The researcher recommends a variety of approaches, including blacklisting and rules-based machine/deep learning, for automatically recognizing malicious links. But the approaches generally necessitate the generation of a set of features to generalize the detection process. Most of the features are generated by processing URLs and content of the web page, as well as some external features such as the ranking of the web page and domain name system information. This process of feature extraction and selection typically takes more time and demands a high level of expertise in the domain. Sometimes the generated features may not leverage the full potentials of the data set. In addition, the majority of the currently deployed systems make use of a single classifier for the classification of malicious links. However, prediction accuracy may vary widely depending on the data set and the classifier used.

To address the issue of generating feature sets, the proposed method uses natural language processing techniques (term frequency and inverse document frequency) that vectorize URLs. To build a robust system for the classification of malicious links, the proposed system implements weighted soft voting classifier, an ensemble classifier that combines predictions of base classifiers. The ability or skill of each classifier serves as the base for the weight that is assigned to it.

The proposed method performs better when the optimal weights are assigned. The performance of the proposed method was assessed by using two different data sets (D1 and D2) and compared performance against base machine learning classifiers and previous research results. The outcome accuracy shows that the proposed method is superior to the existing methods, offering 91.4% and 98.8% accuracy for data sets D1 and D2, respectively.

Churn management is a fundamental process in firms to keep their customers. Therefore, predicting the customer’s churn is essential to facilitate such processes. The literature has introduced data mining approaches for this purpose. On the other hand, results indicate that performance of classification models increases by combining two or more techniques. The purpose of this paper is to propose a combined model based on clustering and ensemble classifiers.

Based on churn data set in Cell2Cell, single baseline classifiers, ensemble classifiers are used for comparisons. Specifically, self-organizing map (SOM) clustering technique, and four other classifier techniques including decision tree, artificial neural networks, support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbors were used. Moreover, for reduced dimensions of the features, principal component analysis (PCA) method was employed.

As results 14 models are compared with each other regarding accuracy, sensitivity, specification, F-measure, and AUC. The results showed that combination of SOM, PCA, and heterogeneous boosting achieved the best performance comparing with other classification models.

This study examined the performance of classifier ensembles in predicting customers churn. In particular, heterogeneous classifier ensembles such as bagging and boosting are compared.

Ensemble methods have been widely used in the field of pattern recognition due to the difficulty of finding a single classifier that performs well on a wide variety of problems. Despite the effectiveness of these techniques, studies have shown that ensemble methods generate a large number of hypotheses and that contain redundant classifiers in most cases. Several works proposed in the state of the art attempt to reduce all hypotheses without affecting performance.

In this work, the authors are proposing a pruning method that takes into consideration the correlation between classifiers/classes and each classifier with the rest of the set. The authors have used the random forest algorithm as trees-based ensemble classifiers and the pruning was made by a technique inspired by the CFS (correlation feature selection) algorithm.

The proposed method CES (correlation-based Ensemble Selection) was evaluated on ten datasets from the UCI machine learning repository, and the performances were compared to six ensemble pruning techniques. The results showed that our proposed pruning method selects a small ensemble in a smaller amount of time while improving classification rates compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

CES is a new ordering-based method that uses the CFS algorithm. CES selects, in a short time, a small sub-ensemble that outperforms results obtained from the whole forest and the other state-of-the-art techniques used in this study.