Boosting is a
machine learning ensemble meta-algorithm for primarily reducing
bias, and also variance in
supervised learning, and a family of machine learning algorithms which convert weak learners to strong ones. Boosting is based on the question posed by
Kearns and
Valiant (1988, 1989): Can a set of
weak learners create a single
strong learner? A weak learner is defined to be a classifier which is only slightly correlated with the true classification (it can label examples better than random guessing). In contrast, a strong learner is a classifier that is arbitrarily well-correlated with the true classification.