An Imprecise Boosting-like Approach to Classification

A new approach for ensemble construction based on restricting a set of weights of examples in training data to avoid overfitting is proposed in the paper. The algorithm called EPIBoost (Extreme Points Imprecise Boost) applies imprecise statistical models to restrict the set of weights. The updating of the weights within the restricted set is replaced by updating the weights in the linear combination of extreme points within the unit simplex. The approach allows us to construct various algorithms by applying different imprecise statistical models for producing the restricted set. It is shown by various numerical experiments with real data sets that the EPIBoost algorithm may outperform the standard AdaBoost by some parameters of imprecise statistical models.