  We propose a novel boosting approach to multi-class classification problems,
in which multiple classes are distinguished by a set of random projection
matrices in essence. The approach uses random projections to alleviate the
proliferation of binary classifiers typically required to perform multi-class
classification. The result is a multi-class classifier with a single
vector-valued parameter, irrespective of the number of classes involved. Two
variants of this approach are proposed. The first method randomly projects the
original data into new spaces, while the second method randomly projects the
outputs of learned weak classifiers. These methods are not only conceptually
simple but also effective and easy to implement. A series of experiments on
synthetic, machine learning and visual recognition data sets demonstrate that
our proposed methods compare favorably to existing multi-class boosting
algorithms in terms of both the convergence rate and classification accuracy.
