Averaging versus voting: A comparative study of strategies for distributed classification

In this paper we proposed two strategies, averaging and voting, to implement distributed classification via the divide and conquer approach. When a data set is too big to be processed by one processor or is naturally stored in different locations, the method partitions the whole data into multiple subsets randomly or according to their locations. Then a base classification algorithm is applied to each subset to produce a local classification model. Finally, averaging or voting is used to couple the local models together to produce the final classification model. We performed thorough empirical studies to compare the two strategies. The results show that averaging is more effective in most scenarios.