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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…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
Analysis of sample survey data often requires adjustments to account for missing data in the outcome variables of principal interest. Standard adjustment methods based on item imputation or on propensity weighting factors rely heavily on…
To further develop the statistical inference problem for heterogeneous treatment effects, this paper builds on Breiman's (2001) random forest tree (RFT)and Wager et al.'s (2018) causal tree to parameterize the nonparametric problem using…
Loss tomography has received considerable attention in recent years and a number of estimators based on maximum likelihood (ML) or Bayesian principles have been proposed. Almost all of the estimators are devoted to the tree topology despite…
This paper gives a new algorithm for sampling tree-weighted partitions of a large class of planar graphs. Formally, the tree-weighted distribution on $k$-partitions of a graph weights $k$-partitions proportional to the product of the number…
Estimating a causal effect from observational data can be biased if we do not control for self-selection. This selection is based on confounding variables that affect the treatment assignment and the outcome. Propensity score methods aim to…
The adoption of the distributed paradigm has allowed applications to increase their scalability, robustness and fault tolerance, but it has also complicated their structure, leading to an exponential growth of the applications'…
It is widely recognised that semiparametric efficient estimation can be hard to achieve in practice: estimators that are in theory efficient may require unattainable levels of accuracy for the estimation of complex nuisance functions. As a…
Supervised learning algorithms generally assume the availability of enough memory to store data models during the training and test phases. However, this assumption is unrealistic when data comes in the form of infinite data streams, or…
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…
A core step of every algorithm for learning regression trees is the selection of the best splitting variable from the available covariates and the corresponding split point. Early tree algorithms (e.g., AID, CART) employed greedy search…
Random forests are a scheme proposed by Leo Breiman in the 2000's for building a predictor ensemble with a set of decision trees that grow in randomly selected subspaces of data. Despite growing interest and practical use, there has been…
In this work, we propose a novel node splitting method for regression trees and incorporate it into the regression forest framework. Unlike traditional binary splitting, where the splitting rule is selected from a predefined set of binary…
We consider random binary trees that appear as the output of certain standard algorithms for sorting and searching if the input is random. We introduce the subtree size metric on search trees and show that the resulting metric spaces…
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…
The most popular approach for analyzing survival data is the Cox regression model. The Cox model may, however, be misspecified, and its proportionality assumption may not always be fulfilled. An alternative approach for survival prediction…
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)…
Decision trees are popular machine learning models that are simple to build and easy to interpret. Even though algorithms to learn decision trees date back to almost 50 years, key properties affecting their generalization error are still…
Ensembles of decision trees are a useful tool for obtaining for obtaining flexible estimates of regression functions. Examples of these methods include gradient boosted decision trees, random forests, and Bayesian CART. Two potential…