Ensemble learning

People have known the benefits of combining information from multiple sources since a long time ago. From the old story of “blind men and an elephant,” we can learn the importance of capturing a big picture instead of focusing on one single perspective. In the story, a group of blind men touch different parts of an elephant to learn what it is like. Each of them makes a judgment about the elephant based on his own observation. For example, the man who touched the ear said it was like a fan while the man who grabbed the tail said it was like a rope. Clearly, each of them just got a partial view and did not arrive at an accurate description of the elephant. However, as they captured different aspects about the elephant, we can learn the big picture by integrating the knowledge about all the parts together.