Input Decimated Ensemble based on Neighborhood Preserving Embedding for spectrogram classification

In this work a novel technique for building ensembles of classifiers for spectrogram classification is presented. We propose a simple approach for classifying signals from a large database of plant echoes, these echoes are highly complex stochastic signals, anyway their spectrograms contain enough information for extracting a good set of features for training the proposed ensemble of classifiers. The proposed ensemble of classifiers is a novel modified version of a recent feature transform based ensemble method: the Input Decimated Ensemble. In the proposed variant different subsets of randomly extracted training patterns are used to create a set of different Neighborhood Preserving Embedding subspace projections. These feature transformations are applied to the whole dataset and a set of decision trees are trained using these transformed spaces. Finally, the scores of this set of classifiers are combined by sum rule. Experiments carried out on a yet proposed dataset show the superiority of this method with respect to other approaches. The proposed approach outperforms the yet proposed, for the tested dataset, combination of principal component analysis and support vector machine (SVM). Moreover, we show that the fusion between the proposed ensemble and the system based on SVM outperforms both the stand-alone methods.