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This term appears frequently in the method-related threads.

Is blending a specific method in data-mining and statistical learning? I cannot get a relevant result from google.

It seems blending is mixing up outcomes from many models and resulting in a better result. Is there any resource that helps me knowing more about it?

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  • $\begingroup$ the question title is data (input) blending, but the question changes in-text to prediction (outcome) blending.Ways to do the second are well known, but the first, input data blending, sounds more interesting $\endgroup$ – develarist Jul 5 '20 at 17:32
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http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~caruana/ctp/ct.papers/caruana.icml04.icdm06long.pdf Some papers to help you further understand what blending is. I think you can also google for ensemble selection/learning, and stacking as well.

Your general understanding of 'mixing up outcomes from many models and resulting in a better result' is correct though.

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  • $\begingroup$ That link was taken from somewhere in the kaggle forum as well. I only saved the link of the pdf but not the discussion though... $\endgroup$ – King Jul 19 '12 at 12:42
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Boosting (as mentioned in the linked discussion) is a method that combines a set of algorithms to get a result that is better than what you can get from any single algorithm. For example random forests is a method for combining various classification trees for a classification algorithm. This approach is formally called ensemble averaging (although the algoithm usually applies majority rule). Blending seems to be a word some people use to describe a boosting approach to classification.

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  • $\begingroup$ So can this be called blending,if I replace the classification trees in a normal adaboost model with other set of algorithms? $\endgroup$ – TomHall Jul 19 '12 at 10:41
  • $\begingroup$ Hi,Michael.Your answer is really helpful but , shame on me , I am new to stats and haven't got enough reputation to vote up your answer yet. $\endgroup$ – TomHall Jul 19 '12 at 14:01
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    $\begingroup$ Well then remember to do it after you get a few rep points. $\endgroup$ – Michael R. Chernick Jul 19 '12 at 14:11
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In industry data blending is not about models but about preprocessing: It is the when data is merged that comes from different sources, like one from a database and other data from CSV files.

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