English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal or Greedy Decision Trees? Revisiting their…

200 papers

Decision trees are a popular choice of explainable model, but just like neural networks, they suffer from adversarial examples. Existing algorithms for fitting decision trees robust against adversarial examples are greedy heuristics and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Daniël Vos , Sicco Verwer

Decision trees are a popular machine learning model which are traditionally trained by heuristic methods. Massive improvements in computing power and optimisation techniques has led to renewed interest in learning globally optimal decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Mitchell Keegan , Michael Forbes , Paul Corry , Mahdi Abolghasemi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-25 Rafael Blanquero , Emilio Carrizosa , Cristina Molero-Río , Dolores Romero Morales

Optimal experimental design (OED) concerns itself with identifying ideal methods of data collection, e.g.~via sensor placement. The \emph{greedy algorithm}, that is, placing one sensor at a time, in an iteratively optimal manner, stands as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-15 Christian Aarset

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

The greedy strategy is an approximation algorithm to solve optimization problems arising in decision making with multiple actions. How good is the greedy strategy compared to the optimal solution? In this survey, we mainly consider two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-10 Yajing Liu , Edwin K. P. Chong , Ali Pezeshki , Zhenliang Zhang

Interpretable models are important, but what happens when the model is updated on new training data? We propose an algorithm for updating a decision tree while minimising the number of changes to the tree that a human would need to audit.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Anj Simmons , Scott Barnett , Anupam Chaudhuri , Sankhya Singh , Shangeetha Sivasothy

Optimal decision tree (\odt) is a fundamental problem arising in applications such as active learning, entity identification, and medical diagnosis. An instance of \odt is given by $m$ hypotheses, out of which an unknown ``true'' hypothesis…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Zhengjia Zhuo , Viswanath Nagarajan

The study of optimal decision trees has gained increasing attention in recent years; however, despite substantial progress, it still suffers from two major challenges: First, trees constructed by existing optimal decision tree (ODT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Xi He

Decision tree learning has long been a central topic in theoretical computer science, driven by its practical importance. A fundamental and widely used method for decision tree construction is the top-down greedy heuristic, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Arshia Soltani Moakahr , Faraz Ghahremani , Kiarash Banihashem , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi

Classification and Regression Tree (CART), Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) are probably the most popular set of statistical learning methods. However, their statistical consistency can only be proved under very…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-17 Haoran Zhan , Yu Liu , Yingcun Xia

Decision trees provide a rich family of highly non-linear but efficient models, due to which they continue to be the go-to family of predictive models by practitioners across domains. But learning trees is challenging due to their discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Ajaykrishna Karthikeyan , Naman Jain , Nagarajan Natarajan , Prateek Jain

Several recent publications report advances in training optimal decision trees (ODT) using mixed-integer programs (MIP), due to algorithmic advances in integer programming and a growing interest in addressing the inherent suboptimality of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Haoran Zhu , Pavankumar Murali , Dzung T. Phan , Lam M. Nguyen , Jayant R. Kalagnanam

Greedy algorithms have been successfully analyzed and applied in training neural networks for solving variational problems, ensuring guaranteed convergence orders. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the orthogonal greedy algorithm…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Jinchao Xu , Xiaofeng Xu

Sparse decision trees are one of the most common forms of interpretable models. While recent advances have produced algorithms that fully optimize sparse decision trees for prediction, that work does not address policy design, because the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Ali Behrouz , Mathias Lecuyer , Cynthia Rudin , Margo Seltzer

Optimal path planning requires finding a series of feasible states from the starting point to the goal to optimize objectives. Popular path planning algorithms, such as Effort Informed Trees (EIT*), employ effort heuristics to guide the…

Boosted ensemble of decision tree (DT) classifiers are extremely popular in international competitions, yet to our knowledge nothing is formally known on how to make them \textit{also} differential private (DP), up to the point that random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-05 Richard Nock , Wilko Henecka

Decision Tree is a classic formulation of active learning: given $n$ hypotheses with nonnegative weights summing to 1 and a set of tests that each partition the hypotheses, output a decision tree using the provided tests that uniquely…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Ray Li , Percy Liang , Stephen Mussmann

We consider parametrized linear-quadratic optimal control problems and provide their online-efficient solutions by combining greedy reduced basis methods and machine learning algorithms. To this end, we first extend the greedy control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-31 Hendrik Kleikamp , Martin Lazar , Cesare Molinari

In recent years, automated data-driven decision-making systems have enjoyed a tremendous success in a variety of fields (e.g., to make product recommendations, or to guide the production of entertainment). More recently, these algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Sina Aghaei , Mohammad Javad Azizi , Phebe Vayanos