Bootstrap aggregating

Bootstrap aggregating, also called bagging (from bootstrap aggregating), is a machine learning ensemble meta-algorithm designed to improve the stability and accuracy of machine learning algorithms used in statistical classification and regression. It also reduces variance and helps to avoid overfitting. Although it is usually applied to decision tree methods, it can be used with any type of method. Bagging is a special case of the model averaging approach. Given a standard training set of size n, bagging generates m new training sets , each of size n′, by sampling from D uniformly and with replacement. By sampling with replacement, some observations may be repeated in each . If n′=n, then for large n the set is expected to have the fraction (1 - 1/e) (≈63.2%) of the unique examples of D, the rest being duplicates. This kind of sample is known as a bootstrap sample. Sampling with replacement ensures each bootstrap is independent from its peers, as it does not depend on previous chosen samples when sampling. Then, m models are fitted using the above m bootstrap samples and combined by averaging the output (for regression) or voting (for classification). Bagging leads to "improvements for unstable procedures", which include, for example, artificial neural networks, classification and regression trees, and subset selection in linear regression. Bagging was shown to improve preimage learning. On the other hand, it can mildly degrade the performance of stable methods such as K-nearest neighbors. There are three types of datasets in bootstrap aggregating. These are the original, bootstrap, and out-of-bag datasets. Each section below will explain how each dataset is made except for the original dataset. The original dataset is whatever information is given. The bootstrap dataset is made by randomly picking objects from the original dataset. Also, it must be the same size as the original dataset. However, the difference is that the bootstrap dataset can have duplicate objects.