English

Making Tree Ensembles Interpretable

Machine Learning 2016-06-20 v1

Abstract

Tree ensembles, such as random forest and boosted trees, are renowned for their high prediction performance, whereas their interpretability is critically limited. In this paper, we propose a post processing method that improves the model interpretability of tree ensembles. After learning a complex tree ensembles in a standard way, we approximate it by a simpler model that is interpretable for human. To obtain the simpler model, we derive the EM algorithm minimizing the KL divergence from the complex ensemble. A synthetic experiment showed that a complicated tree ensemble was approximated reasonably as interpretable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.05390,
  title  = {Making Tree Ensembles Interpretable},
  author = {Satoshi Hara and Kohei Hayashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.05390},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2016), New York, NY