Z. Barutcuoglu,
P. M. Long and R. A. Servedio.
One-pass boosting.
NIPS*07.
Abstract
This paper studies boosting algorithms that make a single
pass over a set of base classifiers: rather than choosing
the "best" base classifier in each round, they pick a random order
over the base classifiers, and use the tth base classifier
during the tth round of boosting.
We first analyze a one-pass algorithm in the setting of boosting with
diverse base classifiers. Our guarantee is the same as the best
proved for any boosting algorithm, but our one-pass algorithm is much
faster than previous approaches.
We next exhibit a random source of examples for which a ``picky''
variant of AdaBoost that skips poor base classifiers can outperform
the standard AdaBoost algorithm, which uses every base classifier,
by an exponential factor.
Experiments with Reuters and synthetic data show that one-pass
boosting can substantially improve on the accuracy of Naive Bayes, and
that picky boosting can sometimes lead to a further improvement in
accuracy.