Combining Pattern Classifiers: Methods and Algorithms, Ludmila I. Kuncheva (2004)
WorldCat entry: Combining Pattern Classifiers: Methods and Algorithms
From the preface:
Everyday life throws at us an endless number of pattern recognition problems: smells, images, voices, faces, situations, and so on. Most of these problems we solve at a sensory level or intuitively, without an explicit method or algorithm. As soon as we are able to provide an algorithm the problem becomes trivial and we happily delegate it to the computer. Indeed, machines have confidently replaced humans in many formerly difficult or impossible, now just tedious pattern recognition tasks such as mail sorting, medical test reading, military target recognition, signature verification, meteorological forecasting, DNA matching, fingerprint recognition, and so on.
In the past, pattern recognition focused on designing single classifiers. This book is about combining the “opinions” of an ensemble of pattern classifiers in the hope that the new opinion will be better than the individual ones. “Vox populi, vox Dei.”
The field of combining classifiers is like a teenager: full of energy, enthusiasm, spontaneity, and confusion; undergoing quick changes and obstructing the attempts to bring some order to its cluttered box of accessories. When I started writing this book, the field was small and tidy, but it has grown so rapidly that I am faced with the Herculean task of cutting out a (hopefully) useful piece of this rich, dynamic, and loosely structured discipline. This will explain why some methods and algorithms are only sketched, mentioned, or even left out and why there is a chapter called “Miscellanea” containing a collection of important topics that I could not fit anywhere else.
Appreciate the author’s suggesting of older material to see how the pattern recognition developed.
Suggestions/comments on this or later literature on pattern recognition?