Homotopy Regularization for Boosting

Abstract

In this paper, we present a homotopy regularization algorithm for boosting. We introduce a regularization term with adaptive weight into the boosting framework and compose a homotopy objective function. Optimization of this objective approximately composes a solution path for the regularized boosting. Following this path, we can find suitable solution efficiently using early stopping. Experiments show that this adaptive regularization method gives a more efficient parameter selection strategy than regularized boosting and semi supervised boosting algorithms, and significantly improves the performances of traditional AdaBoost and related methods.