Related papers: Decision-Path Patterns as Tree Reliability Signals…
Random forests are a very effective and commonly used statistical method, but their full theoretical analysis is still an open problem. As a first step, simplified models such as purely random forests have been introduced, in order to shed…
The classification of imbalanced data has presented a significant challenge for most well-known classification algorithms that were often designed for data with relatively balanced class distributions. Nevertheless skewed class distribution…
Analysis of sample survey data often requires adjustments to account for missing data in the outcome variables of principal interest. Standard adjustment methods based on item imputation or on propensity weighting factors rely heavily on…
This paper shows that decision trees constructed with Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and C4.5 methodology are consistent for regression and classification tasks, even when the number of predictor variables grows…
Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…
Regression trees are a popular machine learning algorithm that fit piecewise constant models by recursively partitioning the predictor space. This paper focuses on statistical inference for a data-dependent model obtained from a fitted…
Several studies have shown that combining machine learning models in an appropriate way will introduce improvements in the individual predictions made by the base models. The key to make well-performing ensemble model is in the diversity of…
Recursive decision trees are widely used to estimate heterogeneous causal treatment effects in experimental and observational studies. These methods are typically implemented using CART-type recursive partitioning and are often viewed as…
Decision trees are important both as interpretable models amenable to high-stakes decision-making, and as building blocks of ensemble methods such as random forests and gradient boosting. Their statistical properties, however, are not well…
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…
Random forests are a learning algorithm proposed by Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45 (2001) 5--32] that combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their predictions by averaging. Despite its wide usage and outstanding practical…
The perspective of developing trustworthy AI for critical applications in science and engineering requires machine learning techniques that are capable of estimating their own uncertainty. In the context of regression, instead of estimating…
Model trees provide an appealing way to perform interpretable machine learning for both classification and regression problems. In contrast to ``classic'' decision trees with constant values in their leaves, model trees can use linear…
We present convincing empirical evidence for an effective and general strategy for building accurate small models. Such models are attractive for interpretability and also find use in resource-constrained environments. The strategy is to…
We demonstrate that adaptively controlling the size of individual regression trees in a random forest can improve predictive performance, contrary to the conventional wisdom that trees should be fully grown. A fast pruning algorithm,…
Random forest regression is a powerful non-parametric method that adapts to local data characteristics through data-driven partitioning, making it effective across diverse application domains. However, the piecewise constant nature of…
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…
Random Forest (Breiman, 2001) is a successful and widely used regression and classification algorithm. Part of its appeal and reason for its versatility is its (implicit) construction of a kernel-type weighting function on training data,…
We study the convergence of the predictive surface of regression trees and forests. To support our analysis we introduce a notion of adaptive concentration for regression trees. This approach breaks tree training into a model selection…
Tree-based ensemble methods, as Random Forests and Gradient Boosted Trees, have been successfully used for regression in many applications and research studies. Furthermore, these methods have been extended in order to deal with uncertainty…