Boosting Classifiers Built from Different Subsets of Features

We focus on the adaptation of boosting to representation spaces composed of different subsets of features. Rather than imposing a single weak learner to handle data that could come from different sources (e.g., images and texts and sounds), we suggest the decomposition of the learning task into several dependent sub-problems of boosting, treated by different weak learners, that will optimally collaborate during the weight update stage. To achieve this task, we introduce a new weighting scheme for which we provide theoretical results. Experiments are carried out and show that our method works significantly better than any combination of independent boosting procedures.