Related papers: Is interpolation benign for random forest regressi…
Many modern machine learning models are trained to achieve zero or near-zero training error in order to obtain near-optimal (but non-zero) test error. This phenomenon of strong generalization performance for "overfitted" / interpolated…
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…
Due to their long-standing reputation as excellent off-the-shelf predictors, random forests continue remain a go-to model of choice for applied statisticians and data scientists. Despite their widespread use, however, until recently, little…
The Random Forest (RF) classifier is often claimed to be relatively well calibrated when compared with other machine learning methods. Moreover, the existing literature suggests that traditional calibration methods, such as isotonic…
Learned classifiers should often possess certain invariance properties meant to encourage fairness, robustness, or out-of-distribution generalization. However, multiple recent works empirically demonstrate that common invariance-inducing…
The practical success of overparameterized neural networks has motivated the recent scientific study of interpolating methods, which perfectly fit their training data. Certain interpolating methods, including neural networks, can fit noisy…
It is notoriously difficult to build a bad Random Forest (RF). Concurrently, RF blatantly overfits in-sample without any apparent consequence out-of-sample. Standard arguments, like the classic bias-variance trade-off or double descent,…
Random forest regression (RF) is an extremely popular tool for the analysis of high-dimensional data. Nonetheless, its benefits may be lessened in sparse settings due to weak predictors, and a pre-estimation dimension reduction (targeting)…
We analyze the prediction error of ridge regression in an asymptotic regime where the sample size and dimension go to infinity at a proportional rate. In particular, we consider the role played by the structure of the true regression…
Classical wisdom suggests that estimators should avoid fitting noise to achieve good generalization. In contrast, modern overparameterized models can yield small test error despite interpolating noise -- a phenomenon often called "benign…
In the absence of explicit regularization, Kernel "Ridgeless" Regression with nonlinear kernels has the potential to fit the training data perfectly. It has been observed empirically, however, that such interpolated solutions can still…
We give examples of data-generating models under which Breiman's random forest may be extremely slow to converge to the optimal predictor or even fail to be consistent. The evidence provided for these properties is based on mostly intuitive…
Updating machine learning models with new information usually improves their predictive performance, yet, in many applications, it is also desirable to avoid changing the model predictions too much. This property is called stability. In…
Overparametrized neural networks tend to perfectly fit noisy training data yet generalize well on test data. Inspired by this empirical observation, recent work has sought to understand this phenomenon of benign overfitting or harmless…
Overparametrized interpolating models have drawn increasing attention from machine learning. Some recent studies suggest that regularized interpolating models can generalize well. This phenomenon seemingly contradicts the conventional…
In many modern applications of deep learning the neural network has many more parameters than the data points used for its training. Motivated by those practices, a large body of recent theoretical research has been devoted to studying…
Random Forests (RFs) are among the state-of-the-art in machine learning and offer excellent performance with nearly zero parameter tuning. Remarkably, RFs seem to be impervious to overfitting even though their basic building blocks are…
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…
Random Forests (RF) is a popular machine learning method for classification and regression problems. It involves a bagging application to decision tree models. One of the primary advantages of the Random Forests model is the reduction in…
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…