Bias-variance analysis of ECOC and bagging using neural nets

One of the methods used to evaluate the performance of ensemble classifiers is bias and variance analysis. In this chapter, we analyse bootstrap aggregating (bagging) and Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) ensembles using a biasvariance framework; and make comparisons with single classifiers, while having Neural Networks (NNs) as base classifiers. As the performance of the ensembles depends on the individual base classifiers, it is important to understand the overall trends when the parameters of the base classifiers -nodes and epochs for NNs-, are changed.We show experimentally on 5 artificial and 4 UCI MLR datasets that there are some clear trends in the analysis that should be taken into consideration while designing NN classifier systems.