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The lack of interpretability remains a key barrier to the adoption of deep models in many applications. In this work, we explicitly regularize deep models so human users might step through the process behind their predictions in little…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-17 Mike Wu , Michael C. Hughes , Sonali Parbhoo , Maurizio Zazzi , Volker Roth , Finale Doshi-Velez

Besides serving as prediction models, classification trees are useful for finding important predictor variables and identifying interesting subgroups in the data. These functions can be compromised by weak split selection algorithms that…

Applications · Statistics 2010-11-03 Wei-Yin Loh

In machine learning algorithm design, there exists a trade-off between the interpretability and performance of the algorithm. In general, algorithms which are simpler and easier for humans to comprehend tend to show worse performance than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Eric M. Vernon , Naoki Masuyama , Yusuke Nojima

We propose a procedure to build a decision tree which approximates the performance of complex machine learning models. This single approximation tree can be used to interpret and simplify the predicting pattern of random forests (RFs) and…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-31 Yichen Zhou , Giles Hooker

Ensembles of decision trees perform well on many problems, but are not interpretable. In contrast to existing approaches in interpretability that focus on explaining relationships between features and predictions, we propose an alternative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-26 Sarah Tan , Matvey Soloviev , Giles Hooker , Martin T. Wells

Random forests are a machine learning method used to automatically classify datasets and consist of a multitude of decision trees. While these random forests often have higher performance and generalize better than a single decision tree,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Max Sondag , Christofer Meinecke , Dennis Collaris , Tatiana von Landesberger , Stef van den Elzen

Towards a future where machine learning systems will integrate into every aspect of people's lives, researching methods to interpret such systems is necessary, instead of focusing exclusively on enhancing their performance. Enriching the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Ioannis Mollas , Nick Bassiliades , Ioannis Vlahavas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Tree-ensemble algorithms, such as random forest, are effective machine learning methods popular for their flexibility, high performance, and robustness to overfitting. However, since multiple learners are combined, they are not as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-09 Klest Dedja , Felipe Kenji Nakano , Konstantinos Pliakos , Celine Vens

Random Forests are widely claimed to capture interactions well. However, some simple examples suggest that they perform poorly in the presence of certain pure interactions that the conventional CART criterion struggles to capture during…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-04 Ricardo Blum , Munir Hiabu , Enno Mammen , Joseph Theo Meyer

Recent efforts to learn reward functions from human feedback have tended to use deep neural networks, whose lack of transparency hampers our ability to explain agent behaviour or verify alignment. We explore the merits of learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Tom Bewley , Jonathan Lawry , Arthur Richards , Rachel Craddock , Ian Henderson

Assume we are given a set of items from a general metric space, but we neither have access to the representation of the data nor to the distances between data points. Instead, suppose that we can actively choose a triplet of items (A,B,C)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-19 Siavash Haghiri , Damien Garreau , Ulrike von Luxburg

This work presents a new classifier that is specifically designed to be fully interpretable. This technique determines the probability of a class outcome, based directly on probability assignments measured from the training data. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-31 Sapan Agarwal , Corey M. Hudson

Random forests are a learning algorithm proposed by Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45 (2001) 5--32] that combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their predictions by averaging. Despite its wide usage and outstanding practical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-08-11 Erwan Scornet , Gérard Biau , Jean-Philippe Vert

Data-driven models are central to scientific discovery. In efforts to achieve state-of-the-art model accuracy, researchers are employing increasingly complex machine learning algorithms that often outperform simple regressions in…

Materials Science · Physics 2022-12-21 Eric S. Muckley , James E. Saal , Bryce Meredig , Christopher S. Roper , John H. Martin

Model trees provide an appealing way to perform interpretable machine learning for both classification and regression problems. In contrast to ``classic'' decision trees with constant values in their leaves, model trees can use linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Sabino Francesco Roselli , Eibe Frank

A random forest is a popular tool for estimating probabilities in machine learning classification tasks. However, the means by which this is accomplished is unprincipled: one simply counts the fraction of trees in a forest that vote for a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-17 Matthew A. Olson , Abraham J. Wyner

We study various types of consistency of honest decision trees and random forests in the regression setting. In contrast to related literature, our proofs are elementary and follow the classical arguments used for smoothing methods. Under…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Martin Bladt , Rasmus Frigaard Lemvig

Interpretability of machine learning models is critical for data-driven precision medicine efforts. However, highly predictive models are generally complex and are difficult to interpret. Here using Model-Agnostic Explanations algorithm, we…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2016-10-31 Gajendra Jung Katuwal , Robert Chen

In classification and forecasting with tabular data, one often utilizes tree-based models. Those can be competitive with deep neural networks on tabular data and, under some conditions, explainable. The explainability depends on the depth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Jiri Nemecek , Tomas Pevny , Jakub Marecek

We propose an algorithm named best-scored random forest for binary classification problems. The terminology "best-scored" means to select the one with the best empirical performance out of a certain number of purely random tree candidates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-28 Hanyuan Hang , Xiaoyu Liu , Ingo Steinwart