Deep Neural Decision Trees
Abstract
Deep neural networks have been proven powerful at processing perceptual data, such as images and audio. However for tabular data, tree-based models are more popular. A nice property of tree-based models is their natural interpretability. In this work, we present Deep Neural Decision Trees (DNDT) -- tree models realised by neural networks. A DNDT is intrinsically interpretable, as it is a tree. Yet as it is also a neural network (NN), it can be easily implemented in NN toolkits, and trained with gradient descent rather than greedy splitting. We evaluate DNDT on several tabular datasets, verify its efficacy, and investigate similarities and differences between DNDT and vanilla decision trees. Interestingly, DNDT self-prunes at both split and feature-level.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.06988,
title = {Deep Neural Decision Trees},
author = {Yongxin Yang and Irene Garcia Morillo and Timothy M. Hospedales},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.06988},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
presented at 2018 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2018), Stockholm, Sweden