Promoting diversity in Gaussian mixture ensembles: an application to signature verification

Classifiers based on Gaussian mixture models are good performers in many pattern recognition tasks. Unlike decision trees, they can be described as stable classifier: a small change in the sampling of the training set will produce not a large change in the parameters of the trained classifier. Given that ensembling techniques often rely on instability of the base classifiers to produce diverse ensembles, thereby reaching better performance than individual classifiers, how can we form ensembles of Gaussian mixture models? This paper proposes methods to optimise coverage in ensembles of Gaussian mixture classifiers by promoting diversity amongst these stable base classifiers. We show that changes in the signal processing chain and modelling parameters can lead to significant complementarity between classifiers, even if trained on the same source signal. We illustrate the approach by applying it to a signature verification problem, and show that very good results are obtained, as verified in the large-scale international evaluation campaign BMEC 2007.