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Related papers: Optimal Policy Trees

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In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-20 Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

State-of-the-art clustering algorithms use heuristics to partition the feature space and provide little insight into the rationale for cluster membership, limiting their interpretability. In healthcare applications, the latter poses a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-04 Dimitris Bertsimas , Agni Orfanoudaki , Holly Wiberg

There is a growing desire in the field of reinforcement learning (and machine learning in general) to move from black-box models toward more "interpretable AI." We improve interpretability of reinforcement learning by increasing the utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Aaron M. Roth , Nicholay Topin , Pooyan Jamshidi , Manuela Veloso

Tree ensembles are very popular machine learning models, known for their effectiveness in supervised classification and regression tasks. Their performance derives from aggregating predictions of multiple decision trees, which are renowned…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-14 Lorenzo Bonasera , Emilio Carrizosa

High-dimensional policies, such as those represented by neural networks, cannot be reasonably interpreted by humans. This lack of interpretability reduces the trust users have in policy behavior, limiting their use to low-impact tasks such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-20 John Mern , Sidhart Krishnan , Anil Yildiz , Kyle Hatch , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

This study proposes an end-to-end algorithm for policy learning in causal inference. We observe data consisting of covariates, treatment assignments, and outcomes, where only the outcome corresponding to the assigned treatment is observed.…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-30 Masahiro Kato

Data-driven optimization uses contextual information and machine learning algorithms to find solutions to decision problems with uncertain parameters. While a vast body of work is dedicated to interpreting machine learning models in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Alexandre Forel , Axel Parmentier , Thibaut Vidal

The automatic generation of decision trees based on off-line reasoning on models of a domain is a reasonable compromise between the advantages of using a model-based approach in technical domains and the constraints imposed by embedded…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-28 L. Console , C. Picardi , D. Theseider Duprè

Computing an optimal classification tree that provably maximizes training performance within a given size limit, is NP-hard, and in practice, most state-of-the-art methods do not scale beyond computing optimal trees of depth three.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Catalin E. Brita , Jacobus G. M. van der Linden , Emir Demirović

Choosing optimal (or at least better) policies is an important problem in domains from medicine to education to finance and many others. One approach to this problem is through controlled experiments/trials - but controlled experiments are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Onur Atan , William R. Zame , M van der Schaar

Tree ensemble models such as random forests and boosted trees are among the most widely used and practically successful predictive models in applied machine learning and business analytics. Although such models have been used to make…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-11 Velibor V. Mišić

Tree-based machine learning models such as random forests, decision trees, and gradient boosted trees are the most popular non-linear predictive models used in practice today, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to explaining…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for deriving optimal policies from observational data, but challenges related to interpretability and evaluation limit its practical use in safety-critical domains. Interpretability is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Anton Matsson , Yaochen Rao , Heather J. Litman , Fredrik D. Johansson

Reinforcement learning techniques achieved human-level performance in several tasks in the last decade. However, in recent years, the need for interpretability emerged: we want to be able to understand how a system works and the reasons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Leonardo Lucio Custode , Giovanni Iacca

Decision tree optimization is fundamental to interpretable machine learning. The most popular approach is to greedily search for the best feature at every decision point, which is fast but provably suboptimal. Recent approaches find the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Varun Babbar , Hayden McTavish , Cynthia Rudin , Margo Seltzer

In the field of decision trees, most previous studies have difficulty ensuring the statistical optimality of a prediction of new data and suffer from overfitting because trees are usually used only to represent prediction functions to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yuta Nakahara , Shota Saito , Naoki Ichijo , Koki Kazama , Toshiyasu Matsushima

Using Machine Learning systems in the real world can often be problematic, with inexplicable black-box models, the assumed certainty of imperfect measurements, or providing a single classification instead of a probability distribution. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Jonathan S. Kent , David H. Menager

Optimal stopping is the problem of deciding when to stop a stochastic system to obtain the greatest reward, arising in numerous application areas such as finance, healthcare and marketing. State-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-01 Dragos Florin Ciocan , Velibor V. Mišić

We introduce a novel interpretable tree based algorithm for prediction in a regression setting. Our motivation is to estimate the unknown regression function from a functional decomposition perspective in which the functional components…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-04 Munir Hiabu , Enno Mammen , Joseph T. Meyer

Survival analysis studies and predicts the time of death, or other singular unrepeated events, based on historical data, while the true time of death for some instances is unknown. Survival trees enable the discovery of complex nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Tim Huisman , Jacobus G. M. van der Linden , Emir Demirović