Boosting for Functional Data

Abstract

We deal with the task of supervised learning if the data is of functional type. The crucial point is the choice of the appropriate fitting method (learner). Boosting is a stepwise technique that combines learners in such a way that the composite learner outperforms the single learner. This can be done by either reweighting the examples or with the help of a gradient descent technique. In this paper, we explain how to extend Boosting methods to problems that involve functional data.