Poster
Lossless or Quantized Boosting with Integer Arithmetic
Richard Nock · Robert C Williamson
Pacific Ballroom #194
Keywords: [ Convex Optimization ] [ Ensemble Methods ] [ Statistical Learning Theory ]
[
Abstract
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Abstract:
In supervised learning, efficiency often starts with the choice of a good loss: support vector machines popularised Hinge loss, Adaboost popularised
the exponential loss, etc. Recent trends in machine learning have
highlighted the necessity for training routines to meet
tight requirements on communication, bandwidth, energy, operations,
encoding, among others. Fitting the often decades-old state of the art
training routines into these new constraints does not go without pain and uncertainty or
reduction in the original guarantees.
Our
paper starts with the design of a new strictly proper canonical, twice differentiable loss called the
Q-loss. Importantly, its mirror update over
(arbitrary) rational inputs uses only integer arithmetics --
more precisely, the sole use of $+, -, /, \times, |.|$. We build a
learning algorithm which is able, under mild assumptions, to achieve a
lossless boosting-compliant training. We
give conditions for a quantization of its main memory footprint,
weights, to be done while keeping the whole algorithm boosting-compliant. Experiments
display that the algorithm can achieve a fast convergence
during the early boosting rounds compared to AdaBoost, even with a weight storage
that can be 30+ times smaller. Lastly, we show that the Bayes risk of the
Q-loss can be used as node splitting criterion for decision trees and
guarantees optimal boosting convergence.
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