  The Ensemble of Classifiers (EoC) has been shown to be effective in improving
the performance of single classifiers by combining their outputs, and one of
the most important properties involved in the selection of the best EoC from a
pool of classifiers is considered to be classifier diversity. In general,
classifier diversity does not occur randomly, but is generated systematically
by various ensemble creation methods. By using diverse data subsets to train
classifiers, these methods can create diverse classifiers for the EoC. In this
work, we propose a scheme to measure data diversity directly from random
subspaces, and explore the possibility of using it to select the best data
subsets for the construction of the EoC. Our scheme is the first ensemble
selection method to be presented in the literature based on the concept of data
diversity. Its main advantage over the traditional framework (ensemble creation
then selection) is that it obviates the need for classifier training prior to
ensemble selection. A single Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a Multi-Objective
Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) were evaluated to search for the best solutions for
the classifier-free ensemble selection. In both cases, objective functions
based on different clustering diversity measures were implemented and tested.
All the results obtained with the proposed classifier-free ensemble selection
method were compared with the traditional classifier-based ensemble selection
using Mean Classifier Error (ME) and Majority Voting Error (MVE). The
applicability of the method is tested on UCI machine learning problems and NIST
SD19 handwritten numerals.
