Evaluation of Ensemble Classifiers for Handwriting Recognition

One of the major developments in machine learning in the past decade is the ensemble method, which finds highly accurate classifier by combining many moderately accurate component classifiers. In this research work, new ensemble classification methods are proposed for homogeneous ensemble classifiers using bagging and heterogeneous ensemble classifiers using arcing classifier and their performances are analyzed in terms of accuracy. A Classifier ensemble is designed using Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as base classifiers. The feasibility and the benefits of the proposed approaches are demonstrated by the means of real and benchmark data sets of recognizing totally unconstrained handwritten numerals. The main originality of the proposed approach is based on three main parts: preprocessing phase, classification phase and combining phase. A wide range of comparative experiments are conducted for real and benchmark data sets of recognizing totally unconstrained handwritten numerals. The accuracy of base classifiers is compared with homogeneous and heterogeneous models for data mining problem. The proposed ensemble methods provide significant improvement of accuracy compared to individual classifiers and also heterogeneous models exhibit better results than homogeneous models for real and benchmark data sets of recognizing totally unconstrained handwritten numerals.