José Luis Alba-Castro

Iago Landesa-Vázquez, José Luis Alba-Castro

A lot of approaches, each following a different strategy, have been proposed in the literature to provide AdaBoost with cost-sensitive properties. In the first part of this series of two papers, we have presented these algorithms in a homogeneous notational framework, proposed a clustering scheme for them and performed a thorough theoretical analysis of those approaches with a fully theoretical foundation. The present paper, in order to complete our analysis, is focused on the empirical study of all the algorithms previously presented over a wide range of heterogeneous classification problems. The results of our experiments, confirming the theoretical conclusions, seem to reveal that the simplest approach, just based on cost-sensitive weight initialization, is the one showing the best and soundest results, despite having been recurrently overlooked in the literature.

Iago Landesa-Vázquez, José Luis Alba-Castro

Boosting algorithms have been widely used to tackle a plethora of problems. In the last few years, a lot of approaches have been proposed to provide standard AdaBoost with cost-sensitive capabilities, each with a different focus. However, for the researcher, these algorithms shape a tangled set with diffuse differences and properties, lacking a unifying analysis to jointly compare, classify, evaluate and discuss those approaches on a common basis. In this series of two papers we aim to revisit the various proposals, both from theoretical (Part I) and practical (Part II) perspectives, in order to analyze their specific properties and behavior, with the final goal of identifying the algorithm providing the best and soundest results.

Iago Landesa-Vázquez, José Luis Alba-Castro

Based on the use of different exponential bases to define class-dependent error bounds, a new and highly efficient asymmetric boosting scheme, coined as AdaBoostDB (Double-Base), is proposed. Supported by a fully theoretical derivation procedure, unlike most of the other approaches in the literature, our algorithm preserves all the formal guarantees and properties of original (cost-insensitive) AdaBoost, similarly to the state-of-the-art Cost-Sensitive AdaBoost algorithm. However, the key advantage of AdaBoostDB is that our novel derivation scheme enables an extremely efficient conditional search procedure, dramatically improving and simplifying the training phase of the algorithm. Experiments, both over synthetic and real datasets, reveal that AdaBoostDB is able to save over 99% training time with regard to Cost-Sensitive AdaBoost, providing the same cost-sensitive results. This computational advantage of AdaBoostDB can make a difference in problems managing huge pools of weak classifiers in which boosting techniques are commonly used.

Iago Landesa-Vázquez, José Luis Alba-Castro

In this paper, we propose a different insight to analyze AdaBoost. This analysis reveals that, beyond some preconceptions, AdaBoost can be directly used as an asymmetric learning algorithm, preserving all its theoretical properties. A novel class-conditional description of AdaBoost, which models the actual asymmetric behavior of the algorithm, is presented.