Anish Sing Walia walks us through a gradient boosting exercise using R:
An important thing to remember in boosting is that the base learner which is being boosted should not be a complex and complicated learner which has high variance for e.g a neural network with lots of nodes and high weight values.For such learners boosting will have inverse effects.
So I will explain Boosting with respect to decision trees in this tutorial because they can be regarded as weak learners most of the times.We will generate a gradient boosting model.
Click through for more details. H/T R-Bloggers