  Early classification of time-series data in a dynamic environment is a
challenging problem of great importance in signal processing. This paper
proposes a classifier architecture with a reject option capable of online
decision making without the need to wait for the entire time series signal to
be present. The main idea is to classify an odor/gas signal with an acceptable
accuracy as early as possible. Instead of using posterior probability of a
classifier, the proposed method uses the "agreement" of an ensemble to decide
whether to accept or reject the candidate label. The introduced algorithm is
applied to the bio-chemistry problem of odor classification to build a novel
Electronic-Nose called Forefront-Nose. Experimental results on wind tunnel
test-bed facility confirms the robustness of the forefront-nose compared to the
standard classifiers from both earliness and recognition perspectives.
