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Random forests are a very effective and commonly used statistical method, but their full theoretical analysis is still an open problem. As a first step, simplified models such as purely random forests have been introduced, in order to shed…
Country instability is a global issue, with unpredictably high levels of instability thwarting socio-economic growth and possibly causing a slew of negative consequences. As a result, uncertainty prediction models for a country are becoming…
Large language models are increasingly used to predict human preferences in both scientific and business endeavors, yet current approaches rely exclusively on analyzing model outputs without considering the underlying mechanisms. Using…
We propose a computationally efficient alternative to generalized random forests (GRFs) for estimating heterogeneous effects in large dimensions. While GRFs rely on a gradient-based splitting criterion, which in large dimensions is…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
Random forests on the one hand, and neural networks on the other hand, have met great success in the machine learning community for their predictive performance. Combinations of both have been proposed in the literature, notably leading to…
Random forests are a statistical learning technique that use bootstrap aggregation to average high-variance and low-bias trees. Improvements to random forests, such as applying Lasso regression to the tree predictions, have been proposed in…
Prediction rule ensembles (PREs) are sparse collections of rules, offering highly interpretable regression and classification models. This paper presents the R package pre, which derives PREs through the methodology of Friedman and Popescu…
An increasingly common methodological issue in the field of social science is high-dimensional and highly correlated datasets that are unamenable to the traditional deductive framework of study. Analysis of candidate choice in the 2020…
Decision analytics commonly focuses on the text mining of financial news sources in order to provide managerial decision support and to predict stock market movements. Existing predictive frameworks almost exclusively apply traditional…
Random Forests [Breiman:2001] (RF) are a fully non-parametric statistical method requiring no distributional assumptions on covariate relation to the response. RF are a robust, nonlinear technique that optimizes predictive accuracy by…
Even at the beginning of 2008, the economic recession of 2008/09 was not being predicted. The failure to predict recessions is a persistent theme in economic forecasting. The Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) provides data on…
Conventional preference learning methods often prioritize opinions held more widely when aggregating preferences from multiple evaluators. This may result in policies that are biased in favor of some types of opinions or groups and…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
Conventionally, random forests are built from "greedy" decision trees which each consider only one split at a time during their construction. The sub-optimality of greedy implementation has been well-known, yet mainstream adoption of more…
Random forest (RF) is one of the most popular methods for estimating regression functions. The local nature of the RF algorithm, based on intra-node means and variances, is ideal when errors are i.i.d. For dependent error processes like…
We propose generalized random forests, a method for non-parametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman, 2001) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as the solution to a set of local moment…
Regression forests have long delivered state-of-the-art accuracy, often outperforming regression trees and even neural networks, but they suffer from limited interpretability as ensemble methods. In this work, we revisit forest pruning, an…
Random forests remain among the most popular off-the-shelf supervised machine learning tools with a well-established track record of predictive accuracy in both regression and classification settings. Despite their empirical success as well…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods provide an elaborate approach to Bayesian inference on complex models, including model choice. Both theoretical arguments and simulation experiments indicate, however, that model posterior…