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Decision tree optimization is notoriously difficult from a computational perspective but essential for the field of interpretable machine learning. Despite efforts over the past 40 years, only recently have optimization breakthroughs been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Jimmy Lin , Chudi Zhong , Diane Hu , Cynthia Rudin , Margo Seltzer

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 recent years, dynamically growing data and incrementally growing number of classes pose new challenges to large-scale data classification research. Most traditional methods struggle to balance the precision and computational burden when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-01 Tingting Xie , Yuxing Peng , Changjian Wang

Despite their remarkable effectiveness and broad application, the drivers of success underlying ensembles of trees are still not fully understood. In this paper, we highlight how interpreting tree ensembles as adaptive and self-regularizing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-05 Alicia Curth , Alan Jeffares , Mihaela van der Schaar

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

Random forests have become an established tool for classification and regression, in particular in high-dimensional settings and in the presence of complex predictor-response relationships. For bounded outcome variables restricted to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-21 Leonie Weinhold , Matthias Schmid , Marvin N. Wright , Moritz Berger

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-06 Sai K Popuri

Random forests remain among the most popular off-the-shelf supervised machine learning tools with a well-established track record of predictive accuracy in both regression and classification settings. Despite their empirical success as well…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-15 Lucas Mentch , Siyu Zhou

We present an algorithm, called the Offset Tree, for learning to make decisions in situations where the payoff of only one choice is observed, rather than all choices. The algorithm reduces this setting to binary classification, allowing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Alina Beygelzimer , John Langford

Decision trees are an extremely popular machine learning technique. Unfortunately, overfitting in decision trees still remains an open issue that sometimes prevents achieving good performance. In this work, we present a novel approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Rafael Garcia Leiva , Antonio Fernandez Anta , Vincenzo Mancuso , Paolo Casari

The potential lack of fairness in the outputs of machine learning algorithms has recently gained attention both within the research community as well as in society more broadly. Surprisingly, there is no prior work developing tree-induction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-25 Edward Raff , Jared Sylvester , Steven Mills

In this paper we propose using the principle of boosting to reduce the bias of a random forest prediction in the regression setting. From the original random forest fit we extract the residuals and then fit another random forest to these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-25 Indrayudh Ghosal , Giles Hooker

Random Forests have been one of the most popular bagging methods in the past few decades, especially due to their success at handling tabular datasets. They have been extensively studied and compared to boosting models, like XGBoost, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Dimitris Bertsimas , Vasiliki Stoumpou

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

Polytrees are a subclass of Bayesian networks that seek to capture the conditional dependencies between a set of $n$ variables as a directed forest and are motivated by their more efficient inference and improved interpretability. Since the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Juha Harviainen , Frank Sommer , Manuel Sorge

We consider the problem of constructing optimal decision trees: given a collection of tests which can disambiguate between a set of $m$ possible diseases, each test having a cost, and the a-priori likelihood of the patient having any…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-24 Anupam Gupta , Viswanath Nagarajan , R. Ravi

We present a comprehensive classical and parameterized complexity analysis of decision tree pruning operations, extending recent research on the complexity of learning small decision trees. Thereby, we offer new insights into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Juha Harviainen , Frank Sommer , Manuel Sorge , Stefan Szeider

Most real-world classification problems deal with imbalanced datasets, posing a challenge for Artificial Intelligence (AI), i.e., machine learning algorithms, because the minority class, which is of extreme interest, often proves difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Gissel Velarde , Michael Weichert , Anuj Deshmunkh , Sanjay Deshmane , Anindya Sudhir , Khushboo Sharma , Vaibhav Joshi

Random Forest (RF) is an ensemble supervised machine learning technique that was developed by Breiman over a decade ago. Compared with other ensemble techniques, it has proved its accuracy and superiority. Many researchers, however, believe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-18 Khaled Fawagreh , Mohamad Medhat Gaber , Eyad Elyan

{\em Reoptimization} is a setting in which we are given an (near) optimal solution of a problem instance and a local modification that slightly changes the instance. The main goal is that of finding an (near) optimal solution of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Davide Bilò