On the convergence of leveraging

Abstract:

We give an unified convergence analysis of ensemble learning methods including e.g. AdaBoost, Logistic Regression and the Least-Square-Boost algorithm for regression. These methods have in common that they iteratively call a base learning algorithm which returns hypotheses that are then linearly combined. We show that these methods are related to the Gauss-Southwell method known from numerical optimization and state non-asymptotical convergence results for all these methods. Our analysis includes l ₁ -norm regularized cost functions leading to a clean and general way to regularize ensemble learning.