On Fusers that Perform Better than Best Sensor

  • Authors:
  • Nageswara S.V. Rao

  • Affiliations:
  • Oak Ridge National Lab., Oak Ridge, TN

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In a multiple sensor system, sensor $S_i$, $i=1, 2 \ldots , N$, outputs $Y^{(i)}\in [0,1]$, according to an unknown probability distribution $P_{Y^{(i)} | X }$, in response to input $X \in [0,1]$. We choose a fuser驴that combines the outputs of sensors驴from a function class ${\cal{F}} = \{ f : [0,1]^N \mapsto [0,1] \}$ by minimizing empirical error based on an iid sample. If $\cal{F}$ satisfies the isolation property, we show that the fuser performs at least as well as the best sensor in a probably approximately correct sense. Several well-known fusers, such as linear combinations, special potential functions, and certain feedforward networks, satisfy the isolation property.