what is indicator function in AdaBoostM1 in Matlab 2012a??

I need the answer of it.... I want to know about the indicator function (I) that is used in Adaboost.M1 Matlab 2012a....

This is used when we are calculating error rate of the weak learner...

I searched for it but unable to get the basic idea and purpose of that function i.e. why is it going to be used in AdaBoost.M1??..

Matlab 2012a's documentation is not providing sufficient information about it....

can u plz tell what is it??.. what is its purpose??... what will happen if we ignore it??..

Answer 1

[Ilya]

"Indicator function" can mean various things in various contexts.You will not find it anywhere in MATLAB doc for ensemble methods.

If you want to compute the error rate, I suggest that you look at the doc for testing ensemble quality

http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/stats/bsvjye9.html#bsvjyrp

and then details of the LOSS method

http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/stats/compactclassificationensemble.loss.html

If these do not tell you how to get the results you want, please explain what functionality you need to compute something specific.