Regularization Through Feature Knock Out

Abstract

In this paper, we present and analyze a novel regularization technique based on enhancing our dataset with corrupted copies of the original data. The motivation is that since the learning algorithm lacks information about which parts of thedata are reliable, it has to produce more robust classification functions. We then demonstrate how this regularization leads to redundancy in the resulting classifiers, which is somewhat in contrast to the common interpretations of the Occam’s razor principle. Using this framework, we propose a simple addition to the gentle boosting algorithm which enables it to work with only a few examples. We test this new algorithm on a variety of datasets and show convincing results.