Boosting with Incomplete Information

Abstract

In real-world machine learning problems, it is very common that part of the input feature vector is incomplete: either not available, missing, or corrupted. In this paper, we present a boosting approach that integrates features with incomplete information and those with complete information to form a strong classifier. By introducing hidden variables to model missing information, we form loss functions that combine fully labeled data with partially labeled data to effectively learn normalized and unnormalized models. The primal problems of the proposed optimization problems with these loss functions are provided to show their close relationships and the motivations behind them. We use auxiliary functions to bound the change of the loss functions and derive explicit parameter update rules for the learning algorithms. We demonstrate encouraging results on two real-world problems - visual object recognition in computer vision and named entity recognition in natural language processing - to show the effectiveness of the proposed boosting approach.