A Two Stage Sequential Ensemble Applied to the Classification of Alzheimer’s Disease Based on MRI Features

摘要

We present a two stage sequential ensemble where data samples whose output from the first classifier fall in a low confidence output interval (LCOI) are processed by a second stage classifier. Training is composed of three processes: training the first classifier, determining the LCOI of the first classifier, and training the second classifier upon the data items whose output fall in the LCOI. The LCOI is determined varying a threshold on the false positive rate (FPR) and false negative rate (FNR) curves. We have tested the approach on a database of feature vectors for the classification of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and control subjects extracted from structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data. In this paper, we focus on the combinations obtained when the first classifier is a relevance vector machine (RVM). Obtained results improve over previous results for this database.