An Ensemble Approach to Data Fusion and Its Application to ATR

Ensemble methods provide a principled framework in which to build high performance classifiers and represent many types of data. As a result, these methods can be useful for making inferences about biometrie and biological events. We introduce a novel ensemble method for combining multiple representations (or views). The method is a multiple view generalization of AdaBoost. Similar to AdaBoost, base classifiers are independently built from each represetation. Unlike AdaBoost, however, all data types share the same sampling distribution computed from the base classifier having the smallest error rate among input sources. As a result, the most consistent data type dominates over time, thereby significantly reducing sensitivity to noise. The method is applied to the problem of facial and gender prediction based on biometrie traits. The new method outperforms several competing techniques including kernel-based data fusion, and is provably better than AdaBoost trained on any single type of data