Predicting rare classes: Can boosting make any weak learner strong?

Mahesh V. Joshi, Ramesh C. Agarwal, Vipin Kumar

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

74 Scopus citations

Abstract

Boosting is a strong ensemble-based learning algorithm with the promise of iteratively improving the classification accuracy using any base learner, as long as it satisfies the condition of yielding weighted accuracy > 0.5. In this paper, we analyze boosting with respect to this basic condition on the base learner, to see if boosting ensures prediction of rarely occurring events with high recall and precision. First we show that a base learner can satisfy the required condition even for poor recall or precision levels, especially for very rare classes. Furthermore, we show that the intelligent weight updating mechanism in boosting, even in its strong cost-sensitive form, does not prevent cases where the base learner always achieves high precision but poor recall or high recall but poor precision, when mapped to the original distribution. In either of these cases, we show that the voting mechanism of boosting fails to achieve good overall recall and precision for the ensemble. In effect, our analysis indicates that one cannot be blind to the base learner performance, and just rely on the boosting mechanism to take care of its weakness. We validate our arguments empirically on variety of real and synthetic are class problems. In particular, using AdaCost as the boosting algorithm, and variations of PNrule and RIPPER as the base learners, we show that if algorithm A achieves better recall-precision balance than algorithm B, then using A as the base learner in AdaCost yields significantly better performance than using B as the base learner.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages297-305
Number of pages9
StatePublished - 2002
EventKDD - 2002 Proceedings of the Eight ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - Edmonton, Alta, Canada
Duration: Jul 23 2002Jul 26 2002

Other

OtherKDD - 2002 Proceedings of the Eight ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityEdmonton, Alta
Period7/23/027/26/02

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