Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Lecture

Adaboost: Boosting Methods

In course

CS-233(b): Introduction to machine learning (BA4)

Machine learning and data analysis are becoming increasingly central in many sciences and applications. In this course, fundamental principles and methods of machine learning will be introduced, analyzed and practically implemented. ...

Description

This lecture covers boosting methods, focusing on Adaboost algorithm. It explains how to iteratively build a weighted sum of weak classifiers to create a strong classifier. The instructor demonstrates the Adaboost algorithm step by step, including initializing data weights, finding classifiers that minimize weighted error, and updating weights. The lecture also includes a toy example to illustrate the concept. Additionally, it discusses the implementation of Adaboost in Python and its application in face detection using Viola & Jones' method.

Instructor

Pascal Fua

Pascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).

Official source

Related concepts (22)

AdaBoost

AdaBoost, short for Adaptive Boosting, is a statistical classification meta-algorithm formulated by Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire in 1995, who won the 2003 Gödel Prize for their work. It can be used in conjunction with many other types of learning algorithms to improve performance. The output of the other learning algorithms ('weak learners') is combined into a weighted sum that represents the final output of the boosted classifier. Usually, AdaBoost is presented for binary classification, although it can be generalized to multiple classes or bounded intervals on the real line.

Boosting (machine learning)

In machine learning, boosting is an ensemble meta-algorithm for primarily reducing bias, and also variance in supervised learning, and a family of machine learning algorithms that convert weak learners to strong ones. Boosting is based on the question posed by Kearns and Valiant (1988, 1989): "Can a set of weak learners create a single strong learner?" A weak learner is defined to be a classifier that is only slightly correlated with the true classification (it can label examples better than random guessing).

Ensemble learning

In statistics and machine learning, ensemble methods use multiple learning algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone. Unlike a statistical ensemble in statistical mechanics, which is usually infinite, a machine learning ensemble consists of only a concrete finite set of alternative models, but typically allows for much more flexible structure to exist among those alternatives.

Gradient boosting

Gradient boosting is a machine learning technique used in regression and classification tasks, among others. It gives a prediction model in the form of an ensemble of weak prediction models, i.e., models that make very few assumptions about the data, which are typically simple decision trees. When a decision tree is the weak learner, the resulting algorithm is called gradient-boosted trees; it usually outperforms random forest.

Early stopping

In machine learning, early stopping is a form of regularization used to avoid overfitting when training a learner with an iterative method, such as gradient descent. Such methods update the learner so as to make it better fit the training data with each iteration. Up to a point, this improves the learner's performance on data outside of the training set. Past that point, however, improving the learner's fit to the training data comes at the expense of increased generalization error.

Related lectures (30)

Structured Classifications: Decision Trees and Boosting

Explores decision trees, overfitting elimination, boosting techniques, and their practical applications in predictive modeling.

Boosting: Adaboost Algorithm

Covers boosting with a focus on the Adaboost algorithm, forward stagewise additive modeling, and gradient tree boosting.

Crash course on ensemble methods: Bagging and Boosting

Covers ensemble methods, AdaBoost, and setting weights for classifiers.

Decision Trees: Induction & Attributes

Explores decision trees, attribute selection, bias-variance tradeoff, and ensemble methods in machine learning.

Decision Forests: Structure and Training