Summary
Background: Boosting algorithms to simultaneously estimate and select predictor effects in statistical
models have gained substantial interest during the last decade.
Objectives: This review highlights recent methodological developments regarding boosting algorithms
for statistical modelling especially focusing on topics relevant for biomedical research.
Methods: We suggest a unified framework for gradient boosting and likelihood-based boosting
(statistical boosting) which have been addressed separately in the literature up to
now.
Results: The methodological developments on statistical boosting during the last ten years
can be grouped into three different lines of research: i) efforts to ensure variable
selection leading to sparser models, ii) developments regarding different types of
predictor effects and how to choose them, iii) approaches to extend the statistical
boosting framework to new regression settings.
Conclusions: Statistical boosting algorithms have been adapted to carry out unbiased variable
selection and automated model choice during the fitting process and can nowadays be
applied in almost any regression setting in combination with a large amount of different
types of predictor effects.
Keywords
Statistical computing - statistical models - algorithms - classification - machine
learning
