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We present a novel prior for tree topology within Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) models. This approach quantifies the hypothetical loss in information and the loss due to complexity associated with choosing the wrong tree…
Decision trees are important both as interpretable models amenable to high-stakes decision-making, and as building blocks of ensemble methods such as random forests and gradient boosting. Their statistical properties, however, are not well…
The linear varying coefficient models posits a linear relationship between an outcome and covariates in which the covariate effects are modeled as functions of additional effect modifiers. Despite a long history of study and use in…
Count-compositional data arise in many different fields, including high-throughput sequencing experiments, ecological surveys, and palaeoclimate studies, where a common, important goal is to understand how covariates relate to the observed…
Tree-boosting is a widely used machine learning technique for tabular data. However, its out-of-sample accuracy is critically dependent on multiple hyperparameters. In this article, we empirically compare several popular methods for…
Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and…
To achieve the goal of providing the best possible care to each patient, physicians need to customize treatments for patients with the same diagnosis, especially when treating diseases that can progress further and require additional…
Scaling regression to large datasets is a common problem in many application areas. We propose a two step approach to scaling regression to large datasets. Using a regression tree (CART) to segment the large dataset constitutes the first…
Determining subgroups that respond especially well (or poorly) to specific interventions (medical or policy) requires new supervised learning methods tailored specifically for causal inference. Bayesian Causal Forest (BCF) is a recent…
Nonparametric regression models such as Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) can be useful in fitting flexible functions of a set of covariates to a response, while accounting for nonlinearities and interactions. However, they are…
Many network applications are based on binary-state networks, where each component has one of two states: success or failure. Efficient algorithms to evaluate binary-state network reliability are continually being developed. Reliability…
Random Forest's performance can be matched by a single slow-growing tree (SGT), which uses a learning rate to tame CART's greedy algorithm. SGT exploits the view that CART is an extreme case of an iterative weighted least square procedure.…
Random Forests (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) are two of the most widely used and highly performing classification and regression models. They aggregate equally weighted CART trees, generated randomly in RF or sequentially in…
Individualized treatment rules (ITR) can improve health outcomes by recognizing that patients may respond differently to treatment and assigning therapy with the most desirable predicted outcome for each individual. Flexible and efficient…
We propose a new framework for contextual multi-armed bandits based on tree ensembles. Our framework adapts two widely used bandit methods, Upper Confidence Bound and Thompson Sampling, for both standard and combinatorial settings. As part…
The XGBoost method has many advantages and is especially suitable for statistical analysis of big data, but its loss function is limited to convex functions. In many specific applications, a nonconvex loss function would be preferable. In…
Tree-based ensemble methods such as random forests, gradient-boosted trees, and Bayesianadditive regression trees have been successfully used for regression problems in many applicationsand research studies. In this paper, we study ensemble…
Flow network models can capture the underlying physics and operational constraints of many networked systems including the power grid and transportation and water networks. However, analyzing reliability of systems using computationally…
In recent years, Machine Learning algorithms, in particular supervised learning techniques, have been shown to be very effective in solving regression problems. We compare the performance of a newly proposed regression algorithm against…
This work develops formal statistical inference procedures for machine learning ensemble methods. Ensemble methods based on bootstrapping, such as bagging and random forests, have improved the predictive accuracy of individual trees, but…