Glossary term
Glossary term
Foundations
The idea that averaging the opinions or estimates of a large group of people ("the crowd") often produces surprisingly good results. For example, consider a game in which people guess the number of jelly beans packed into a large jar. Although most individual guesses will be inaccurate, the average of all the guesses has been empirically shown to be surprisingly close to the actual number of jelly beans in the jar.
Ensembles are a software analog of wisdom of the crowd. Even if individual models make wildly inaccurate predictions, averaging the predictions of many models often generates surprisingly good predictions. For example, although an individual decision tree might make poor predictions, a decision forest often makes very good predictions.
Created for this library
A consumer-tech startup uses wisdom of the crowd by averaging user ratings to produce a single product score that is more stable than any individual rating.
A research team uses wisdom of the crowd by averaging predictions from multiple annotators to reduce label noise.
A forecasting team uses wisdom of the crowd by averaging analyst predictions to produce a consensus number more robust than individual estimates.
Definition source: Google for Developers Machine Learning Glossary | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License