Brittany Perry, a Master of Science candidate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, will present her Masters Research Project (STAT 5P99) titled Boosting Methods for Classification with Small Sample Size on Friday, April 21, 2023 from 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm in-person in MCJ 404.

Abstract:

AdaBoost is an ensemble method that can be used to boost the performance of machine learning algorithms by combining several weak learners to create a single strong learner. The most popular weak learner is a decision stump (low depth decision tree). One limitation of AdaBoost is its effectiveness when working with small sample sizes. This work explores variants to the AdaBoost algorithm such as Real AdaBoost, Logit Boost, and Gentle AdaBoost. These variants all follow a gradient boosting procedure like AdaBoost, with modifications to the weak learners and weights used. We are specifically interested in the accuracy of these boosting algorithms when used with small sample sizes. As an application, we study the link between functional network connectivity (as measured by EEG recordings) and Schizophrenia by testing whether the proposed methods can classify a participant as Schizophrenic or healthy control based on quantities measured from their EEG recording.

Keywords: AdaBoost , decision trees, small sample size, gradient boosting, Schizophrenia