A Literature Survey and Empirical Study of Meta-Learning for Classifier Selection

Classification is the key and most widely studied paradigm in machine learning community. The selection of appropriate classification algorithm for a particular problem is a challenging task, formally known as algorithm selection problem (ASP) in literature. It is increasingly becoming focus of research in machine learning community. Meta-learning has demonstrated substantial success in solving ASP, especially in the domain of classification. Considerable progress has been made in classification algorithm recommendation and researchers have proposed various methods in literature that tackles ASP in many different ways in meta-learning setup. Yet there is a lack of survey and comparative study that critically analyze, summarize and assess the performance of existing methods. To fill these gaps, in this paper we first present a literature survey of classification algorithm recommendation methods. The survey shed light on the motivational reasons for pursuing classifier selection through meta-learning and comprehensively discusses the different phases of classifier selection based on a generic framework that is formed as an outcome of reviewing prior works. Subsequently, we critically analyzed and summarized the existing studies from the literature in three important dimensions i.e., meta-features, meta-learner and meta-target. In the second part of this paper, we present extensive comparative evaluation of all the prominent methods for classifier selection based on 17 classification algorithms and 84 benchmark datasets. The comparative study quantitatively assesses the performance of classifier selection methods and highlight the limitations and strengths of meta-features, meta-learners and meta-target in classification algorithm recommendation system. Finally, we conclude this paper by identifying current challenges and suggesting future work directions. We expect that this work will provide baseline and a solid overview of state of the art works in this domain to new researchers, and will steer future research in this direction.