Pattern Classification Using Ensemble Methods

This book is designed to provide students, teachers, and researchers with a text that includes a full range of statistical methods available to address commonly encountered research problems. Many textbooks for introductory, intermediate, and advanced statistics courses focus heavily on parametric methods. However, in practice the assumptions underlying these methods are frequently not met, therefore calling into question their use. This book addresses this issue by presenting parametric, nonparametric, robust, and Bayesian techniques that are appropriate for research scenarios often encountered in practice and typically found in statistics courses. For each of these major topics, the standard parametric approach is presented, along with the assumptions underlying it and the methods used to assess the viability of these assumptions. Next, a set of alternative techniques for the research scenario is presented and applied to the motivating example that begins each chapter. Each chapter c