Abstention Reduces Errors - decision Abstaining N-version Genetic Programming
Kosuke Imamura, Robert B. Heckendorn, Terence Soule, James A. Foster · 2002
Optimal fault masking N-Version Genetic Programming (NVGP) is a technique for building fault tolerant software via ensemble of automatically generated modules in such a way as to maximize their collective fault masking ability. Decision Abstaining N-Version Genetic Programming is NVGP that abstains from decision-making, when there is no decisive vote among the modules to make a decision. A special course of action may be taken for an abstained instance. We found that decision abstention contributed to error reduction in our experimental Escherichia coli DNA promoter sequence classification problem. Though decision abstention may reduce errors, high abstention rate makes the system of little use. This paper investigates the trade-off between abstention rate and error reduction. 1