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The global optimization literature places large emphasis on reducing intractable optimization problems into more tractable structured optimization forms. In order to achieve this goal, many existing methods are restricted to optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-28 Dimitris Bertsimas , Berk Öztürk

The optimal dynamic treatment rule (ODTR) framework offers an approach for understanding which kinds of patients respond best to specific treatments -- in other words, treatment effect heterogeneity. Recently, there has been a proliferation…

We consider the problem of learning classification trees that are robust to distribution shifts between training and testing/deployment data. This problem arises frequently in high stakes settings such as public health and social work where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Nathan Justin , Sina Aghaei , Andrés Gómez , Phebe Vayanos

Decision trees are machine learning models commonly used in various application scenarios. In the era of big data, traditional decision tree induction algorithms are not suitable for learning large-scale datasets due to their stringent data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Zhe Lin , Sharad Sinha , Wei Zhang

Recent works have shown that gradient-update alignment is a powerful signal for modulating optimizer updates, often leading to faster training. We promote this update-wise heuristic as a mathematically grounded principle for selecting and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaerin Lee , Kyoung Mu Lee

Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Andrew Silva , Taylor Killian , Ivan Dario Jimenez Rodriguez , Sung-Hyun Son , Matthew Gombolay

Retrieving relevant targets from an extremely large target set under computational limits is a common challenge for information retrieval and recommendation systems. Tree models, which formulate targets as leaves of a tree with trainable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Jingwei Zhuo , Ziru Xu , Wei Dai , Han Zhu , Han Li , Jian Xu , Kun Gai

The number of trees T in the random forest (RF) algorithm for supervised learning has to be set by the user. It is controversial whether T should simply be set to the largest computationally manageable value or whether a smaller T may in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-11 Philipp Probst , Anne-Laure Boulesteix

ODTLearn is an open-source Python package that provides methods for learning optimal decision trees for high-stakes predictive and prescriptive tasks based on the mixed-integer optimization (MIO) framework proposed in (Aghaei et al., 2021)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Patrick Vossler , Sina Aghaei , Nathan Justin , Nathanael Jo , Andrés Gómez , Phebe Vayanos

We propose an approach for learning optimal tree-based prescription policies directly from data, combining methods for counterfactual estimation from the causal inference literature with recent advances in training globally-optimal decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Maxime Amram , Jack Dunn , Ying Daisy Zhuo

Decision Tree (DT) Learning is a fundamental problem in Interpretable Machine Learning, yet it poses a formidable optimisation challenge. Practical algorithms have recently emerged, primarily leveraging Dynamic Programming and Branch &…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ayman Chaouki , Jesse Read , Albert Bifet

Global optimization of decision trees has shown to be promising in terms of accuracy, size, and consequently human comprehensibility. However, many of the methods used rely on general-purpose solvers for which scalability remains an issue.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Jacobus G. M. van der Linden , Mathijs M. de Weerdt , Emir Demirović

This paper presents a detailed comparison of a recently proposed algorithm for optimizing decision trees, tree alternating optimization (TAO), with other popular, established algorithms. We compare their performance on a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-23 Arman Zharmagambetov , Suryabhan Singh Hada , Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán , Magzhan Gabidolla

Tree-based models are widely recognized for their interpretability and have proven effective in various application domains, particularly in high-stakes domains. However, learning decision trees (DTs) poses a significant challenge due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Sascha Marton

The selection problem of an optimal set of sensors estimating the snapshot of high-dimensional data is considered. The objective functions based on various criteria of optimal design are adopted to the greedy method: D-optimality,…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-09 Kumi Nakai , Keigo Yamada , Takayuki Nagata , Yuji Saito , Taku Nonomura

A tremendous range of design tasks in materials, physics, and biology can be formulated as finding the optimum of an objective function depending on many parameters without knowing its closed-form expression or the derivative. Traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Ye Wei , Bo Peng , Ruiwen Xie , Yangtao Chen , Yu Qin , Peng Wen , Stefan Bauer , Po-Yen Tung

In multi-task learning, multiple tasks are solved jointly, sharing inductive bias between them. Multi-task learning is inherently a multi-objective problem because different tasks may conflict, necessitating a trade-off. A common compromise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-14 Ozan Sener , Vladlen Koltun

In several applications of automatic diagnosis and active learning a central problem is the evaluation of a discrete function by adaptively querying the values of its variables until the values read uniquely determine the value of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-07-29 Ferdinando Cicalese , Eduardo Laber , Aline Medeiros Saettler

Whilst optimal transport (OT) is increasingly being recognized as a powerful and flexible approach for dealing with fairness issues, current OT fairness methods are confined to the use of discrete OT. In this paper, we leverage recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Silvia Chiappa , Aldo Pacchiano

Optimal Transport (OT) problem aims to find a transport plan that bridges two distributions while minimizing a given cost function. OT theory has been widely utilized in generative modeling. In the beginning, OT distance has been used as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Jaemoo Choi , Jaewoong Choi , Myungjoo Kang