Decorate

Package

weka.classifiers.meta

Synopsis

DECORATE is a meta-learner for building diverse ensembles of classifiers by using specially constructed artificial training examples. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that this technique is consistently more accurate than the base classifier, Bagging and Random Forests.Decorate also obtains higher accuracy than Boosting on small training sets, and achieves comparable performance on larger training sets.

For more details see:

P. Melville, R. J. Mooney: Constructing Diverse Classifier Ensembles Using Artificial Training Examples. In: Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 505-510, 2003.

P. Melville, R. J. Mooney (2004). Creating Diversity in Ensembles Using Artificial Data. Information Fusion: Special Issue on Diversity in Multiclassifier Systems.

Available in Weka 3.6.x - 3.7.1. Available via the package management system for Weka >= 3.7.2 (decorate).

Options

The table below describes the options available for Decorate.

Option	Description
artificialSize	determines the number of artificial examples to use during training. Specified as a proportion of the training data. Higher values can increase ensemble diversity.
classifier	The base classifier to be used.
debug	If set to true, classifier may output additional info to the console.
desiredSize	the desired number of member classifiers in the Decorate ensemble. Decorate may terminate before this size is reached (depending on the value of numIterations). Larger ensemble sizes usually lead to more accurate models, but increases training time and model complexity.
numIterations	the maximum number of Decorate iterations to run. Each iteration generates a classifier, but does not necessarily add it to the ensemble. Decorate stops when the desired ensemble size is reached. This parameter should be greater than equal to the desiredSize. If the desiredSize is not being reached it may help to increase this value.
seed	The random number seed to be used.

Capabilities

The table below describes the capabilites of Decorate.

Capability	Supported
Class	Missing class values, Binary class, Nominal class
Attributes	Empty nominal attributes, Date attributes, Nominal attributes, Missing values, Binary attributes, Numeric attributes, Unary attributes
Min # of instances	10