A Family of Online Boosting Algorithms

Abstract

Boosting has become a powerful and useful tool in the machine learning and computer vision communities in recent years, and many interesting boosting algorithms have been developed to solve various challenging problems. In particular, Friedman proposed a flexible framework called gradient boosting, which has been used to derive boosting procedures for regression, multiple instance learning, semi-supervised learning, etc. Recently some attention has been given to online boosting (where the examples become available one at a time). In this paper we develop a boosting framework that can be used to derive online boosting algorithms for various cost functions. Within this framework, we derive online boosting algorithms for Logistic Regression, Least Squares Regression, and Multiple Instance Learning. We present promising results on a wide range of data sets.