Ensemble Methods: Elegant Techniques to Produce Improved Machine Learning Results

Ensemble methods are techniques that create multiple models and then combine them to produce improved results. Ensemble methods usually produces more accurate solutions than a single model would. This has been the case in a number of machine learning competitions, where the winning solutions used ensemble methods. In the popular Netflix Competition, the winner used an ensemble method to implement a powerful collaborative filtering algorithm. Another example is KDD 2009 where the winner also used ensemble methods.