This paper addresses the issues of intelligibility, classification speed, and required space in majority voting classifiers. Methods that classify unknown cases using multiple classifiers (e.g. bagging, boosting) have been actively studied in recent years. Since these methods classify a case by taking majority voting over the classifiers, the reasons behind the decision cannot be described in a logical form. Moreover, a large number of classifiers is needed to significantly improve the accuracy. This greatly increases the amount of time and space needed in classification. To solve these problems, a method for learning a single decision tree that approximates the majority voting classifiers is proposed in this paper. The proposed method generates if-then rules from each classifier, and then learns a single decision tree from these rules. Experimental results show that the decision trees by our method are considerably compact and have similar accuracy compared to bagging. Moreover, the proposed method is 8 to 24 times faster than bagging in classification.

In spite of the progress of machine recognition techniques of Latin, Kana, and Chinese characters over the two past decades, the machine recognition of Arabic characters has remained almost untouched. In this correspondence, a structural recognition method of Arabic cursively handwritten words is proposed. In this method, words are first segmented into strokes. Those strokes are then classified using their geometrical and topological properties. Finally, the relative position of the classified strokes are examined, and the strokes are combined in several steps into a string of characters that represents the recognized word. Experimental results on texts handwritten by two persons showed high recognition accuracy.