Generating Accurate and Diverse Members of a Neural-Network Ensemble

In particular, combining separately trained neural networks (commonly referred to as a neural-network ensemble) has been demonstrated to be particularly successful (Alpaydin, 1993; Drucker et al., 1994; Hansen and Salamon, 1990; Hashem et al., 1994; Krogh and Vedelsby, 1995; Maclin and Shavlik, 1995; Perrone, 1992). Both theoretical (Hansen and Salamon, 1990;Krogh and Vedelsby, 1995) and empirical (Hashem et al., 1994; 536 D.W. OPITZ, J. W. SHAVLIK Maclin and Shavlik, 1995) work has shown that a good ensemble is one where the individual networks are both accurate and make their errors on different parts of the input space; however, most previous work has either focussed on combining the output of multiple trained networks or only indirectly addressed how we should generate a good set of networks.