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So, far I have read following regarding boosting:

  • Boosting is an ensemble technique.
  • Train learner sequentially, where early learners fit simple models to the data.
  • Analyze data for errors, that is, focus on records that have high errors and try to get them right.
  • In the end, all the classifiers are given weights and combined to give a final prediction.

Gradient Boosting (Boosted tree) for regression: Repeatedly follow these steps:

(1) Learn a regression classifier

(2) Compute the error residual ( obs y - predicted y) per data point

(3) Learn a new model to try to predict the error residual.

So, the step I don't understand is, how do you combine step 1 and 3 ( and repeat the whole process again?) I have read that you add the two classifiers together, ( one from step 1 and second from step 3 and you repeat the process). So, my question is, how does this combining step 1 and step 3 take place and go to the next stage? Explanation with a few data points ( numerical example) to visualize the algorithm will be very helpful.

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  • $\begingroup$ I don't know if I can answer your question, but the vignettes that come with the gbm and dismo packages in R have some great information on gradient boosting and may be of help to you. $\endgroup$
    – GNG
    Dec 5, 2014 at 19:09

1 Answer 1

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Step 1 and 3 correspond to the same step repeated within the iterarive loop.

Steps are:

  1. Learn a model

  2. Begin iteration

    • Compute errors
    • Learn a new model that can reduce previous errors

Boosting usually learn models that can reduce previous errors by two mechanisms:

  • If the algorithm allows to give weights to instances, highly weight those instances corresponding to large previous errors
  • Bootstrap the original sample, giving a higher probability of ocurrence to those instances corresponding to larger previous errors.
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