Stochastic attribute selection committees

Classifier committee learning methods generate multiple classifters to form a committee by repeated application of a single base learning algorithm. The committee members vote to decide the final classification. Two such methods, Bagging and Boosting, have shown great success with decision tree learning. They create different classifiers by modifying the distribution of the training set. This paper studies a different approach: Stochastic Attribute Selection Committee learning of decision trees. It generates classifier committees by stochastically modifying the set of attributes but keeping the distribution of the training set unchanged. An empirical evaluation of a variant of this method, namely Snsc, in a representative collection of natural domains shows that the SASC method can significantly reduce the error rate of decision tree learning. On average SASC is more accurate than Bagging and less accurate than Boosting, although a one-tailed sign-test fails to show that these differences are significant at a level of 0.05. In addition, it is found that, like Bagging, Snsc is more stable than Boosting in terms of less frequently obtaining significantly higher error rates than C4.5 and, when error is raised, producing lower error rate increases. Moreover, like Bagging, Snsc is amenable to parallel and distributed processing while Boosting is not.