Boosting the Area under the ROC Curve

We show that any weak ranker that can achieve an area under the ROC curve slightly better than 1/2 (which can be achieved by random guessing) can be efficiently boostedto achieve an area under the ROC curve arbitrarily close to 1. We further show that this boosting can be performed even in the presence of independent misclassificationnoise, given access to a noise-tolerant weak ranker.