Leveraging weak learners via adaptive boosting

In this section about ensemble methods, we will discuss boosting with a special focus on its most common implementation, AdaBoost (short for Adaptive Boosting).

Note

The original idea behind AdaBoost was formulated by Robert Schapire in 1990 (R. E. Schapire. The Strength of Weak Learnability. Machine learning, 5(2):197–227, 1990). After Robert Schapire and Yoav Freund presented the AdaBoost algorithm in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference (ICML 1996), AdaBoost became one of the most widely used ensemble methods in the years that followed (Y. Freund, R. E. Schapire, et al. Experiments with a New Boosting Algorithm. In ICML, volume 96, pages 148–156, 1996). In 2003, Freund and Schapire received the Goedel Prize for their groundbreaking work, which is a prestigious prize for the most outstanding publications in the computer science field.

In boosting, the ensemble consists of very simple base classifiers, also often referred...