Boosting for Comparison-Based Learning

10/31/2018

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by   Michaël Perrot, et al.

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We consider the problem of classification in a comparison-based setting: given a set of objects, we only have access to triplet comparisons of the form "object x_i is closer to object x_j than to object x_k." In this paper we introduce TripletBoost, a new method that can learn a classifier just from such triplet comparisons. The main idea is to aggregate the triplets information into weak classifiers, which can subsequently be boosted to a strong classifier. Our method has two main advantages: (i) it is applicable to data from any metric space, and (ii) it can deal with large scale problems using only passively obtained and noisy triplets. We derive theoretical generalization guarantees and a lower bound on the number of necessary triplets, and we empirically show that our method is both competitive with state of the art approaches and resistant to noise.