What is voting in ensemble learning and what are its types?

Updated May 16, 2026

Short answer

Voting combines predictions from multiple models using majority or weighted decision rules.

Deep explanation

Voting ensembles aggregate predictions from multiple models. Hard voting selects the most frequent class label among models. Soft voting averages predicted probabilities and selects the class with the highest probability. Weighted voting assigns different importance to models based on performance. Soft voting generally performs better when models are well-calibrated.

Real-world example

Email spam filters combine multiple classifiers using weighted voting.

Common mistakes

  • Using soft voting without probability calibration.

Follow-up questions

  • When is hard voting better?
  • What is weighted voting?

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