Stacking With Auxiliary Features

Ensembling methods are well known for improving prediction accuracy. However, they are limited in the sense that they cannot effectively discriminate among component models. In this paper, we propose stacking with auxiliary features that learns to fuse additional relevant information from multiple component systems as well as input instances to improve performance. We use two types of auxiliary features -- instance features and provenance features. The instance features enable the stacker to discriminate across input instances and the provenance features enable the stacker to discriminate across component systems. When combined together, our algorithm learns to rely on systems that not just agree on an output but also the provenance of this output in conjunction with the properties of the input instance. We demonstrate the success of our approach on three very different and challenging natural language and vision problems: Slot Filling, Entity Discovery and Linking, and ImageNet Object Detection. We obtain new state-of-the-art results on the first two tasks and significant improvements on the ImageNet task, thus verifying the power and generality of our approach.

Authors

• Nazneen Fatema Rajani
• Raymond J. Mooney

Keywords

• Machine Learning: Ensemble Methods
• Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction