Question

I’m implementing an application using AdaBoost to classify if an elephant is Asian or African elephant. My input data is:

Elephant size: 235  Elephant weight: 3568  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: Asian
Elephant size: 321  Elephant weight: 4789  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African
Elephant size: 389  Elephant weight: 5689  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African
Elephant size: 210  Elephant weight: 2700  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: Asian
Elephant size: 270  Elephant weight: 3654  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: Asian
Elephant size: 289  Elephant weight: 3832  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African
Elephant size: 368  Elephant weight: 5976  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African
Elephant size: 291  Elephant weight: 4872  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: Asian
Elephant size: 303  Elephant weight: 5132  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African
Elephant size: 246  Elephant weight: 2221  Sample weight: 0.1  Elephant type: African

I created a Classifier class:

import java.util.ArrayList;

public class Classifier {
private String feature;
private int treshold;
private double errorRate;
private double classifierWeight;

public void classify(Elephant elephant){
    if(feature.equals("size")){
        if(elephant.getSize()>treshold){
            elephant.setClassifiedAs(ElephantType.African);
        }
        else{
            elephant.setClassifiedAs(ElephantType.Asian);
        }           
    }
    else if(feature.equals("weight")){
        if(elephant.getWeight()>treshold){
            elephant.setClassifiedAs(ElephantType.African);
        }
        else{
            elephant.setClassifiedAs(ElephantType.Asian);
        }
    }
}

public void countErrorRate(ArrayList<Elephant> elephants){
    double misclassified = 0;
    for(int i=0;i<elephants.size();i++){
        if(elephants.get(i).getClassifiedAs().equals(elephants.get(i).getType()) == false){
            misclassified++;
        }
    }
    this.setErrorRate(misclassified/elephants.size());
}

public void countClassifierWeight(){
    this.setClassifierWeight(0.5*Math.log((1.0-errorRate)/errorRate));
}

public Classifier(String feature, int treshold){
    setFeature(feature);
    setTreshold(treshold);
}

And I trained in main() a classifier which classifies by “size” and a treshold = 250 just like this:

 main.trainAWeakClassifier("size", 250);

After my classifier classifies each elephant I count the classifier error, update weights of each sample (elephant) and count the weight of the classifier. My questions are:

How do I create the next classifier and how does it care about misclassified samples more(I know that sample weight is the key but how does it work cause I don’t know how to implement it)?
Did I create the first classifier properly?

Answer 1

Well, you compute the error rate and can classify the instances, but what you are missing is the update of the classifiers and combining them into one per the Ada Boost formula.
Take a look at the algorithm here:
Wikipedia’s Ada Boost webpage