Quickly Boosting Decision Trees - Pruning Underachieving Features Early

Boosted decision trees are one of the most popular and successful learning techniques used today. While exhibiting fast speeds at test time, relatively slow training makes them impractical for applications with real-time learning requirements. We propose a principled approach to overcome this drawback. We prove a bound on the error of a decision stump given its preliminary error on a subset of the training data; the bound may be used to prune unpromising features early on in the training process. We propose a fast training algorithm that exploits this bound, yielding speedups of an order of magnitude at no cost in the final performance of the classifier. Our method is not a new variant of Boosting; rather, it may be used in conjunction with existing Boosting algorithms and other sampling heuristics to achieve even greater speedups

Tasting Families of Features for Image Classification

Using multiple families of image features is a very efficient strategy to improve performance in object detection or recognition. However, such a strategy induces multiple challenges for machine learning methods, both from a computational and a statistical perspective. The main contribution of this paper is a novel feature sampling procedure dubbed “Tasting” to improve the efficiency of Boosting in such a context. Instead of sampling features in a uniform manner, Tasting continuously estimates the expected loss reduction for each family from a limited set of features sampled prior to the learning, and biases the sampling accordingly. We evaluate the performance of this procedure with tens of families of features on four image classification and object detection data-sets. We show that Tasting, which does not require the tuning of any meta-parameter, outperforms systematically variants of uniform sampling and state-of-the-art approaches based on bandit strategies

BoostingTree: parallel selection of weak learners in boosting, with application to ranking

Boosting algorithms have been found successful in many areas of machine learning and, in particular, in ranking. For typical classes of weak learners used in boosting (such as decision stumps or trees), a large feature space can slow down the training, while a long sequence of weak hypotheses combined by boosting can result in a computationally expensive model. In this paper we propose a strategy that builds several sequences of weak hypotheses in parallel, and extends the ones that are likely to yield a good model. The weak hypothesis sequences are arranged in a boosting tree, and new weak hypotheses are added to promising nodes (both leaves and inner nodes) of the tree using some randomized method. Theoretical results show that the proposed algorithm asymptotically achieves the performance of the base boosting algorithm applied. Experiments are provided in ranking web documents and move ordering in chess, and the results indicate that the new strategy yields better performance when the length of the sequence is limited, and converges to similar performance as the original boosting algorithms otherwise. © 2013 The Author(s)

Tune and mix: learning to rank using ensembles of calibrated multi-class classifiers

ANR-2010-COSI-002In subset ranking, the goal is to learn a ranking function that approximates a gold standard partial ordering of a set of objects (in our case, a set of documents retrieved for the same query). The partial ordering is given by relevance labels representing the relevance of documents with respect to the query on an absolute scale. Our approach consists of three simple steps. First, we train standard multi-class classifiers (AdaBoost.MH and multi-class SVM) to discriminate between the relevance labels. Second, the posteriors of multi-class classifiers are calibrated using probabilistic and regression losses in order to estimate the Bayes-scoring function which optimizes the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). In the third step, instead of selecting the best multi-class hyperparameters and the best calibration, we mix all the learned models in a simple ensemble scheme. Our extensive experimental study is itself a substantial contribution. We compare most of the existing learning-to-rank techniques on all of the available large-scale benchmark data sets using a standardized implementation of the NDCG score. We show that our approach is competitive with conceptually more complex listwise and pairwise methods, and clearly outperforms them as the data size grows. As a technical contribution, we clarify some of the confusing results related to the ambiguities of the evaluation tools, and propose guidelines for future studies

Adaptive Sampling for Large Scale Boosting

Classical Boosting algorithms, such as AdaBoost, build a strong classifier without concern for the computational cost. Some applications, in particular in computer vision, may involve millions of training examples and very large feature spaces. In such contexts, the training time of off-the-shelf Boosting algorithms may become prohibitive. Several methods exist to accelerate training, typically either by sampling the features or the examples used to train the weak learners. Even if some of these methods provide a guaranteed speed improvement, they offer no insurance of being more efficient than any other, given the same amount of time. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) a strategy to better deal with the increasingly common case where features come from multiple sources (eg. color, shape, texture, etc. in the case of images) and therefore can be partitioned into meaningful subsets; (2) new algorithms which balance at every Boosting iteration the number of weak learners and the number of training examples to look at in order to maximize the expected loss reduction. Experiments in image classification and object recognition on four standard computer vision data-sets show that the adaptive methods we propose outperform basic sampling and state-of-the-art bandit methods

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae - Electrical and Mechanical Engineering

Series Electrical and Mechanical Engineering publishes original papers and surveys in various fields of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering

Boosting Boosting

Machine learning is becoming prevalent in all aspects of our lives. For some applications, there is a need for simple but accurate white-box systems that are able to train efficiently and with little data. "Boosting" is an intuitive method, combining many simple (possibly inaccurate) predictors to form a powerful, accurate classifier. Boosted classifiers are intuitive, easy to use, and exhibit the fastest speeds at test-time when implemented as a cascade. However, they have a few drawbacks: training decision trees is a relatively slow procedure, and from a theoretical standpoint, no simple unified framework for cost-sensitive multi-class boosting exists. Furthermore, (axis-aligned) decision trees may be inadequate in some situations, thereby stalling training; and even in cases where they are sufficiently useful, they don't capture the intrinsic nature of the data, as they tend to form boundaries that overfit. My thesis focuses on remedying these three drawbacks of boosting. Ch.III outlines a method (called QuickBoost) that trains identical classifiers at an order of magnitude faster than before, based on a proof of a bound. In Ch.IV, a unified framework for cost-sensitive multi-class boosting (called REBEL) is proposed, both advancing theory and demonstrating empirical gains. Finally, Ch.V describes a novel family of weak learners (called Localized Similarities) that guarantee theoretical bounds and outperform decision trees and Neural Nets (as well as several other commonly used classification methods) on a range of datasets. The culmination of my work is an easy-to-use, fast-training, cost-sensitive multi-class boosting framework whose functionality is interpretable (since each weak learner is a simple comparison of similarity), and whose performance is better than Neural Networks and other competing methods. It is the tool that everyone should have in their toolbox and the first one they try.</p