Learning ensemble classifiers via restricted Boltzmann machines

•We study how to integrate RBMs with bagging to construct good ensemble classifiers.•Fusing classifiers trained with original features and those learned by 1 RBM behaves best.•Features extracted by RBMs should be used together with the original ones.•Performing model combination is better than data combination.•The features learned by 2 RBMs seem to contain less discriminative information.

Recently, restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) have attracted considerable interest in machine learning field due to their strong ability to extract features. Given some training data, an RBM or a stack of several RBMs can be used to extract informative features. Meanwhile, ensemble learning is an active research area in machine learning owing to their potential to greatly increase the prediction accuracy of a single classifier. However, RBMs have not been studied to work with ensemble learning so far. In this study, we present several methods for integrating RBMs with bagging to generate diverse and accurate individual classifiers. Taking a classification tree as the base learning algorithm, a thoroughly experimental study conducted on 31 real-world data sets yields some promising conclusions. When using the features extracted by RBMs in ensemble learning, the best way is to perform model combination respectively on the original feature set and the one extracted by a single RBM. However, the prediction performance becomes worse when the features detected by a stack of 2 RBMs are also considered. As for the features detected by RBMs, good classification can be obtained only when they are used together with the original features.