9,976 research outputs found
Boosting through Optimization of Margin Distributions
Boosting has attracted much research attention in the past decade. The
success of boosting algorithms may be interpreted in terms of the margin
theory. Recently it has been shown that generalization error of classifiers can
be obtained by explicitly taking the margin distribution of the training data
into account. Most of the current boosting algorithms in practice usually
optimizes a convex loss function and do not make use of the margin
distribution. In this work we design a new boosting algorithm, termed
margin-distribution boosting (MDBoost), which directly maximizes the average
margin and minimizes the margin variance simultaneously. This way the margin
distribution is optimized. A totally-corrective optimization algorithm based on
column generation is proposed to implement MDBoost. Experiments on UCI datasets
show that MDBoost outperforms AdaBoost and LPBoost in most cases.Comment: 9 pages. To publish/Published in IEEE Transactions on Neural
Networks, 21(7), July 201
RandomBoost: Simplified Multi-class Boosting through Randomization
We propose a novel boosting approach to multi-class classification problems,
in which multiple classes are distinguished by a set of random projection
matrices in essence. The approach uses random projections to alleviate the
proliferation of binary classifiers typically required to perform multi-class
classification. The result is a multi-class classifier with a single
vector-valued parameter, irrespective of the number of classes involved. Two
variants of this approach are proposed. The first method randomly projects the
original data into new spaces, while the second method randomly projects the
outputs of learned weak classifiers. These methods are not only conceptually
simple but also effective and easy to implement. A series of experiments on
synthetic, machine learning and visual recognition data sets demonstrate that
our proposed methods compare favorably to existing multi-class boosting
algorithms in terms of both the convergence rate and classification accuracy.Comment: 15 page
A Primal-Dual Convergence Analysis of Boosting
Boosting combines weak learners into a predictor with low empirical risk. Its
dual constructs a high entropy distribution upon which weak learners and
training labels are uncorrelated. This manuscript studies this primal-dual
relationship under a broad family of losses, including the exponential loss of
AdaBoost and the logistic loss, revealing:
- Weak learnability aids the whole loss family: for any {\epsilon}>0,
O(ln(1/{\epsilon})) iterations suffice to produce a predictor with empirical
risk {\epsilon}-close to the infimum;
- The circumstances granting the existence of an empirical risk minimizer may
be characterized in terms of the primal and dual problems, yielding a new proof
of the known rate O(ln(1/{\epsilon}));
- Arbitrary instances may be decomposed into the above two, granting rate
O(1/{\epsilon}), with a matching lower bound provided for the logistic loss.Comment: 40 pages, 8 figures; the NIPS 2011 submission "The Fast Convergence
of Boosting" is a brief presentation of the primary results; compared with
the JMLR version, this arXiv version has hyperref and some formatting tweak
Totally Corrective Multiclass Boosting with Binary Weak Learners
In this work, we propose a new optimization framework for multiclass boosting
learning. In the literature, AdaBoost.MO and AdaBoost.ECC are the two
successful multiclass boosting algorithms, which can use binary weak learners.
We explicitly derive these two algorithms' Lagrange dual problems based on
their regularized loss functions. We show that the Lagrange dual formulations
enable us to design totally-corrective multiclass algorithms by using the
primal-dual optimization technique. Experiments on benchmark data sets suggest
that our multiclass boosting can achieve a comparable generalization capability
with state-of-the-art, but the convergence speed is much faster than stage-wise
gradient descent boosting. In other words, the new totally corrective
algorithms can maximize the margin more aggressively.Comment: 11 page
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