An Ensemble Learning Method Based on an Evidential Reasoning Rule considering Combination Weighting

As an extension of Dempster–Shafer (D-S) theory, the evidential reasoning (ER) rule can be used as a combination strategy in ensemble learning to deeply mine classifier information through decision-making reasoning. The weight of evidence is an important parameter in the ER rule, which has a significant effect on the result of ensemble learning. However, current research results on the weight of evidence are not ideal, leveraging expert knowledge to assign weights leads to the excessive subjectivity, and using sample statistical methods to assign weights relies too heavily on the samples, so the determined weights sometimes differ greatly from the actual importance of the attributes. Therefore, to solve the problem of excessive subjectivity and objectivity of the weights of evidence, and further improve the accuracy of ensemble learning based on the ER rule, we propose a novel combination weighting method to determine the weight of evidence. The combined weights are calculated by leveraging our proposed method to combine subjective and objective weights of evidence. The regularization of these weights is studied. Then, the evidential reasoning rule is used to integrate different classifiers. Five case studies of image classification datasets have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the combination weighting method.