Classification and Regression Trees

A working guide to boosted regression trees Elith 2008 Apr 08, 2008 · Here, though, we focus on regression trees (including logistic regression trees), and the intuition is different. For regression problems, boosting is a form of ‘functional gradient descent’. Consider a loss function – in this case, a measure (such as deviance) that represents the loss in predictive performance due to a suboptimal model.