Additive Model Boosting: New Insights and Path(ologie)s

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Schulte, Rickmer, Rügamer, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schulte, Rickmer
Rügamer, David
author_facet Schulte, Rickmer
Rügamer, David
contents Additive models (AMs) have sparked a lot of interest in machine learning recently, allowing the incorporation of interpretable structures into a wide range of model classes. Many commonly used approaches to fit a wide variety of potentially complex additive models build on the idea of boosting additive models. While boosted additive models (BAMs) work well in practice, certain theoretical aspects are still poorly understood, including general convergence behavior and what optimization problem is being solved when accounting for the implicit regularizing nature of boosting. In this work, we study the solution paths of BAMs and establish connections with other approaches for certain classes of problems. Along these lines, we derive novel convergence results for BAMs, which yield crucial insights into the inner workings of the method. While our results generally provide reassuring theoretical evidence for the practical use of BAMs, they also uncover some ``pathologies'' of boosting for certain additive model classes concerning their convergence behavior that require caution in practice. We empirically validate our theoretical findings through several numerical experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05538
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Additive Model Boosting: New Insights and Path(ologie)s
Schulte, Rickmer
Rügamer, David
Machine Learning
Additive models (AMs) have sparked a lot of interest in machine learning recently, allowing the incorporation of interpretable structures into a wide range of model classes. Many commonly used approaches to fit a wide variety of potentially complex additive models build on the idea of boosting additive models. While boosted additive models (BAMs) work well in practice, certain theoretical aspects are still poorly understood, including general convergence behavior and what optimization problem is being solved when accounting for the implicit regularizing nature of boosting. In this work, we study the solution paths of BAMs and establish connections with other approaches for certain classes of problems. Along these lines, we derive novel convergence results for BAMs, which yield crucial insights into the inner workings of the method. While our results generally provide reassuring theoretical evidence for the practical use of BAMs, they also uncover some ``pathologies'' of boosting for certain additive model classes concerning their convergence behavior that require caution in practice. We empirically validate our theoretical findings through several numerical experiments.
title Additive Model Boosting: New Insights and Path(ologie)s
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05538