Evaluation of diversity measures for multiple classifier fusion by majority voting

Abstract

Recently, decision fusion has shown great potential to increase classification accuracy beyond the level reached by individual classijiers. However, dependencies among classijiers ' outputs strongly influence performance in a multiple classijier system (MCS) and thus have to be taken into account. In this paper, diversity between diferent classifers used in remote sensing is assessed statistically. Several such measures are surveyed and evaluated on real benchmark remote-sensing datasets and using simulations. The quality of a measure is assessed by the improvement in the accuracy of the multiple classijiers combined by the simple, yet efficient majority voting rule, Our experiments show that some diversity measures can indeed predict the performance of the fused classijiers, and thus should be considered on designing a MCS.