It's worth checking out Friedman's "Gradient Boosting Machine" paper (as mentioned here in the references) from 1999 -- this has a good description of "boosting

It's worth checking out Friedman's "Gradient Boosting Machine" paper (as mentioned here in the references) from 1999 -- this has a good description of "boosting" from the general perspective of function optimisation. Here's a copy: [pdf] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.31.869&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.31....