English

The Impossibility of Parallelizing Boosting

Machine Learning 2023-08-22 v3 Computational Complexity Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

The aim of boosting is to convert a sequence of weak learners into a strong learner. At their heart, these methods are fully sequential. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of parallelizing boosting. Our main contribution is a strong negative result, implying that significant parallelization of boosting requires an exponential blow-up in the total computing resources needed for training.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.09627,
  title  = {The Impossibility of Parallelizing Boosting},
  author = {Amin Karbasi and Kasper Green Larsen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.09627},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:18:04.958Z