Ensembles on Random Patches

In this paper, we consider supervised learning under the assumption that the available memory is small compared to the dataset size. This general framework is relevant in the context of big data, distributed databases and embedded systems. We investigate a very simple, yet effective, ensemble framework that builds each individual model of the ensemble from a random patch of data obtained by drawing random subsets of both instances and features from the whole dataset. We carry out an extensive and systematic evaluation of this method on 29 datasets, using decision tree-based estimators. With respect to popular ensemble methods, these experiments show that the proposed method provides on par performance in terms of accuracy while simultaneously lowering the memory needs, and attains significantly better performance when memory is severely constrained.