Freedom to Tinker: Boosting
Posted on March 4, 2005
The ‘boost’ retraining technique has won the prestigious Kanellakis Award this year.
Suppose we have a machine learning algorithm that does just a little better than random guessing for some class of problems. Schapire and Freund figured out a trick for ‘boosting’ the performance of any such algorithm. To use their method, start by using the algorithm on the example data to deduce a rule. Call this Rule 1. Now look at each example object and see whether Rule 1 categorizes it correctly. If Rule 1 gets an object right, then lower that object’s importance weight a little; if Rule 1 gets an object wrong, then raise that object’s weight a little. Now run the learning algorithm again on the objects with the tweaked weights, to deduce another rule. Call this Rule 1a.
» Filed Under Blogger Posts
Comments
Leave a Reply