please post

[Harris Drucker]

Please announce to connectionists bulletin board:

Two papers on using boosting techniques to improve the performance
of classification trees are available via anonymous ftp:

The first paper describes a preliminary set of experiments showing
that an ensemble of trees constructed using Freund and Schapire's 
boosting algorithm is much better than single trees:

Boosting Decision Trees
Harris Drucker and Corinna Cortes
to be published in NIPS 8, 1996.
A new boosting algorithm of Freund and Schapire is used to improve
the performance of decision trees which are constructed using the information
ratio criterion of Quinlan's C4.5 algorithm.  This boosting algorithm
iteratively constructs a series of decision trees, each decision tree
being trained and pruned on examples that have been filtered by
previously trained trees.  Examples that have been incorrectly classified
by the previous trees in the ensemble are resampled with higher probability
to give a new probability distribution for the next tree in the ensemble to
train on.  Results from optical character recognition (OCR), and knowledge
discovery and data mining problems show that in comparison to single trees, 
or to trees trained independently, or to trees trained on
subsets of the feature space, the boosting ensemble is much better.

The second paper extends this work giving more details and applies this
technique to the design of a fast preclassifier for OCR:
Fast Decision Tree Ensembles for
Optical Character Recognition
by Harris Drucker
accepted by Fifth Annual Symposium on Document Analysis 
and Information Retrieval (1996) in Las Vegas

To get both-papers:

unix> ftp ftp.monmouth.edu  (or ftp 192.100.64.2)
Connected to monmouth.edu.
220 monnet FTP server (Version wu-2.4(1) Mon Oct 9 18:48:45 EDT 1995) ready.
Name (ftp.monmouth.edu:hd): anonymous (no space after the :)
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password: (your email address)
230-Welcome to the Monmouth University FTP server
230-
ftp> binary
Type set to I.
ftp> cd pub/drucker
250 CWD command successful
ftp> get nips-paper.ps.Z
ftp> get las-vegas-paper.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress nips-paper.ps.Z
unix> uncompress las-vegas-paper.ps.Z
unix> lpr (or your postscript print command) (either paper)

Any problems, contact me at hd at harris.monmouth.edu

Harris Drucker