Ensemble Learning: When everybody takes a guess…I guess!
Remember a few months ago when everyone was taking wild guesses at the color of the dress (blue or gold) or the tennis shoe (pink or grey)? For me, Ensemble Learning looks a bit like that. A group of weak learners comes together to form a strong learner, thus increasing the accuracy of any Machine Learning model.
Have you ever heard about Wisdom of the Crowd? Not the TV Series, but the real term. No? Ok…so, imagine you ask a complex question to thousands of random people. Now, aggregate their answers.
What you will probably find is that the answer given by the majority is better than the expert’s answer.
The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert — Wikipedia
Returning to the field of Machine Learning, we can apply the same idea. For example, if we aggregate the predictions of a group of predictors (such as classifiers and regressors), we will probably get a better prediction than with the best individual predictor.
A group of predictors is called an ensemble. Therefore this Machine Learning technique is known as Ensemble Learning…
