Related papers: Selecting Hyperparameters for Tree-Boosting
Gradient-boosted decision trees are among the strongest off-the-shelf predictors for tabular regression, but point predictions alone do not quantify uncertainty. Conformal prediction provides distribution-free marginal coverage, yet split…
Stochastic Gradient TreeBoost is often found in many winning solutions in public data science challenges. Unfortunately, the best performance requires extensive parameter tuning and can be prone to overfitting. We propose PaloBoost, a…
Inference-time alignment enhances the performance of large language models without requiring additional training or fine-tuning but presents challenges due to balancing computational efficiency with high-quality output. Best-of-N (BoN)…
Machine learning techniques lend themselves as promising decision-making and analytic tools in a wide range of applications. Different ML algorithms have various hyper-parameters. In order to tailor an ML model towards a specific…
Tree-based methods are popular machine learning techniques used in various fields. In this work, we review their foundations and a general framework the importance sampled learning ensemble (ISLE) that accelerates their fitting process.…
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…
Despite much work on advanced deep learning and generative modeling techniques for tabular data generation and imputation, traditional methods have continued to win on imputation benchmarks. We herein present UnmaskingTrees, a simple method…
Natural gradient has been recently introduced to the field of boosting to enable the generic probabilistic predication capability. Natural gradient boosting shows promising performance improvements on small datasets due to better training…
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…
Recent scientific advances require complex experiment design, necessitating the meticulous tuning of many experiment parameters. Tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE) is a widely used Bayesian optimization method in recent parameter tuning…
Decision tree learning is a widely used approach in machine learning, favoured in applications that require concise and interpretable models. Heuristic methods are traditionally used to quickly produce models with reasonably high accuracy.…
This paper develops a novel stochastic tree ensemble method for nonlinear regression, which we refer to as XBART, short for Accelerated Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. By combining regularization and stochastic search strategies from…
High-cardinality categorical variables are variables for which the number of different levels is large relative to the sample size of a data set, or in other words, there are few data points per level. Machine learning methods can have…
We give a simple, fast algorithm for hyperparameter optimization inspired by techniques from the analysis of Boolean functions. We focus on the high-dimensional regime where the canonical example is training a neural network with a large…
Model performance is frequently reported only for the overall population under consideration. However, due to heterogeneity, overall performance measures often do not accurately represent model performance within specific subgroups. We…
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.…
SVM with an RBF kernel is usually one of the best classification algorithms for most data sets, but it is important to tune the two hyperparameters $C$ and $\gamma$ to the data itself. In general, the selection of the hyperparameters is a…
Aggregating multiple learners through an ensemble of models aim to make better predictions by capturing the underlying distribution of the data more accurately. Different ensembling methods, such as bagging, boosting, and stacking/blending,…
Tree ensemble models such as random forests and boosted trees are among the most widely used and practically successful predictive models in applied machine learning and business analytics. Although such models have been used to make…
The effect of training data size on machine learning methods has been well investigated over the past two decades. The predictive performance of tree based machine learning methods, in general, improves with a decreasing rate as the size of…