# How to tune an weighted voting ensemble method?

I am working on kidney cancer patients' data with 5 unbalanced labels. These codes are contained of Normalization, Oversampling on Feature Engineering part. A list of 9 ordinary Machine Learning methods is provided which are used for the classification task. Then, I take advantage of two kinds of ensemble methods of hard voting and weighted voting methods. 10-fold CV has is exploited to validate results.

methods = ['Support Vector Machine', 'Logistic Regression', 'K Neighbors Classifier', 'Random Forest', \
'Gaussian Naive Bayes', 'Linear Discriminant Analysis', 'Decision Tree', 'Gradient Boosting',\
'soft_VotingClassifier','hard_VotingClassifier']


I would like to know how to tune weights for the soft voting method one? Here, are the code and results I have right now:

from sklearn import preprocessing
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
from sklearn.naive_bayes import GaussianNB
from sklearn.discriminant_analysis import LinearDiscriminantAnalysis
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.ensemble import VotingClassifier

if method == 'soft_VotingClassifier':
cl1 = LogisticRegression()
cl2 = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=10)
cl3 = RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=35)
cl4 = GaussianNB()
cl5 = LinearDiscriminantAnalysis()
cl6 = DecisionTreeClassifier()
cl7 = SVC(C=0.1, gamma=0.0001, kernel='poly')
estimator = [(method[0],cl1), (method[1],cl2), (method[2],cl3), (method[3],cl4),\
(method[4],cl5), (method[5],cl6), (method[6],cl7), (method[7],cl8)]
eclf = VotingClassifier(estimators=estimator,
voting='soft', weights=[5, 5, 10, 5, 6, 8, 4, 10])

if method == 'hard_VotingClassifier':
cl1 = LogisticRegression()
cl2 = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors=10)
cl3 = RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=35)
cl4 = GaussianNB()
cl5 = LinearDiscriminantAnalysis()
cl6 = DecisionTreeClassifier()
cl7 = SVC(kernel='linear',gamma='scale')
estimator = [(method[0],cl1), (method[1],cl2), (method[2],cl3), (method[3],cl4),\
(method[4],cl5), (method[5],cl6), (method[6],cl7), (method[7],cl8)]
eclf = VotingClassifier(estimators=estimator, voting='hard')


Confusion Matrix results on test data:

[50  5  1  4  2]
[ 0 13  1  0  3]
[ 0  1  2  1  1]
[ 4  0  0  2  0]
[ 0  3  0  0  2]


Accuracy result on test data:

For those kind people who want to check my code or even run them, I gonna put the repository link.

• There is a similar question, you could possibly find an answer in the question itself. If you don't, let me know datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/85644/… – Carlos Mougan Nov 24 '20 at 8:26
• May I give you more tips? What kind of score should I define for 5 unbalanced classes? While I have used accuracy, I know this metric does not work well for 5 classes. When they are unbalanced can be even worse. – amin Nov 24 '20 at 18:57
• Dear @CarlosMougan, May you kindly, share your idea with me? – amin Nov 30 '20 at 1:41

The question is a classical optimization problem.

To make it more simple, lets say that you have 2 models (m1 and m2). And you want to do an ensemble.

First idea, is doing the mean of both

(m1.predict(X) + m2.predict(X))/2


Then you want to optimize the best combination of both models.

for w in [0,0.25,0.5,0.75,1]:
(w * m1.predict(X) + (1-w) * predict(X) ) / 2
print(evaluate results/MSE/Accuracy...)


Your problem is exactly the same as this one but using the voting classifier.

You just need to optimize the array. In a for loop.

weights=[5, 5, 10, 5, 6, 8, 4, 10]


In this case, your array is not normalized and it has more models. So it will take longer. Also voting classifier fits every time the model, so I will take you a long time. Is easier to code it yourself.

• Dear @CarlosMougan, As I understand from your answer, I need to normalize my array for the first step. I mean their summation be always equal to 1 (a + b + ... + h + I = 1). Then try to optimize this array of weights. But, the remind question is how to optimize this array in a loop? Do you have an idea to write an optimizer for doing so? – amin Dec 1 '20 at 17:40
• You can just implement it yourself. The most basic way is a for loop. – Carlos Mougan Dec 1 '20 at 19:02