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Related papers: Rigorous Explanations for Tree Ensembles

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Model interpretability has become an important problem in machine learning (ML) due to the increased effect that algorithmic decisions have on humans. Counterfactual explanations can help users understand not only why ML models make certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Ana Lucic , Harrie Oosterhuis , Hinda Haned , Maarten de Rijke

Counterfactual explanations are usually generated through heuristics that are sensitive to the search's initial conditions. The absence of guarantees of performance and robustness hinders trustworthiness. In this paper, we take a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Axel Parmentier , Thibaut Vidal

Tree-based machine learning models such as random forests, decision trees, and gradient boosted trees are the most popular non-linear predictive models used in practice today, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to explaining…

Decision tree models, including random forests and gradient-boosted decision trees, are widely used in machine learning due to their high predictive performance. However, their complex structures often make them difficult to interpret,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Akihiro Takemura , Masayuki Otani , Katsumi Inoue

Recently, deep neural networks have expanded the state-of-art in various scientific fields and provided solutions to long standing problems across multiple application domains. Nevertheless, they also suffer from weaknesses since their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Felipe Kenji Nakano , Konstantinos Pliakos , Celine Vens

Tree ensembles are non-parametric methods widely recognized for their accuracy and ability to capture complex interactions. While these models excel at prediction, they are difficult to interpret and may fail to uncover useful relationships…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-01 Brian Liu , Rahul Mazumder , Peter Radchenko

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 and random forest remain highly competitive for classification on medium-sized, standard datasets due to their robustness, minimal preprocessing requirements, and interpretability. However, a single tree suffers from high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Cencheng Shen , Yuexiao Dong , Carey E. Priebe

We propose to use boosted regression trees as a way to compute human-interpretable solutions to reinforcement learning problems. Boosting combines several regression trees to improve their accuracy without significantly reducing their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-20 Alexander Brown , Marek Petrik

Tree ensembles are flexible predictive models that can capture relevant variables and to some extent their interactions in a compact and interpretable manner. Most algorithms for obtaining tree ensembles are based on versions of boosting or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Gitesh Dawer , Yangzi Guo , Adrian Barbu

Boosted trees is a dominant ML model, exhibiting high accuracy. However, boosted trees are hardly intelligible, and this is a problem whenever they are used in safety-critical applications. Indeed, in such a context, rigorous explanations…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Gilles Audemard , Jean-Marie Lagniez , Pierre Marquis , Nicolas Szczepanski

Random Forests and related tree-based methods are popular for supervised learning from table based data. Apart from their ease of parallelization, their classification performance is also superior. However, this performance, especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Tom Hanika , Johannes Hirth

Prediction rule ensembles (PREs) are a relatively new statistical learning method, which aim to strike a balance between predictive accuracy and interpretability. Starting from a decision tree ensemble, like a boosted tree ensemble or a…

Applications · Statistics 2023-10-02 Marjolein Fokkema , Carolin Strobl

The recent increase in the deployment of machine learning models in critical domains such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance has highlighted the need for trustworthy methods that can explain these models to stakeholders. Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Angeline Yasodhara , Azin Asgarian , Diego Huang , Parinaz Sobhani

In classification and forecasting with tabular data, one often utilizes tree-based models. Those can be competitive with deep neural networks on tabular data and, under some conditions, explainable. The explainability depends on the depth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Jiri Nemecek , Tomas Pevny , Jakub Marecek

Nowadays new technologies, and especially artificial intelligence, are more and more established in our society. Big data analysis and machine learning, two sub-fields of artificial intelligence, are at the core of many recent breakthroughs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Antonio Sutera

Imagine being able to ask questions to a black box model such as "Which adversarial examples exist?", "Does a specific attribute have a disproportionate effect on the model's prediction?" or "What kind of predictions could possibly be made…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Laurens Devos , Wannes Meert , Jesse Davis

We study various types of consistency of honest decision trees and random forests in the regression setting. In contrast to related literature, our proofs are elementary and follow the classical arguments used for smoothing methods. Under…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Martin Bladt , Rasmus Frigaard Lemvig

Due to their accuracies, methods based on ensembles of regression trees are a popular approach for making predictions. Some common examples include Bayesian additive regression trees, boosting and random forests. This paper focuses on…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-15 Suofei Wu , Jan Hannig , Thomas C. M. Lee

Ensemble learning is a process by which multiple base learners are strategically generated and combined into one composite learner. There are two features that are essential to an ensemble's performance, the individual accuracies of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Wenjing Li , Randy C. Paffenroth , David Berthiaume