Related papers: On Conditional Branches in Optimal Decision Trees
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…
Decision trees are one of the most useful and popular methods in the machine learning toolbox. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning optimal decision trees, a combinatorial optimization problem that is challenging to solve at…
Decision trees have been a very popular class of predictive models for decades due to their interpretability and good performance on categorical features. However, they are not always robust and tend to overfit the data. Additionally, if…
A decision tree recursively splits a feature space $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and then assigns class labels based on the resulting partition. Decision trees have been part of the basic machine-learning toolkit for decades. A large body of work treats…
Tree-based models have proven to be an effective solution for web ranking as well as other problems in diverse domains. This paper focuses on optimizing the runtime performance of applying such models to make predictions, given an…
In the first paper (part I) of this series of two, we introduce four novel definitions of the ODT problems: three for size-constrained trees and one for depth-constrained trees. These definitions are stated unambiguously through executable…
Multivariate decision trees are powerful machine learning tools for classification and regression that attract many researchers and industry professionals. An optimal binary tree has two types of vertices, (i) branching vertices which have…
We consider the problem of learning decision rules for prediction with feature budget constraint. In particular, we are interested in pruning an ensemble of decision trees to reduce expected feature cost while maintaining high prediction…
We study the problem of evaluating a discrete function by adaptively querying the values of its variables until the values read uniquely determine the value of the function. Reading the value of a variable is done at the expense of some…
Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
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.…
The branching algorithm is a fundamental technique for designing fast exponential-time algorithms to solve combinatorial optimization problems exactly. It divides the entire solution space into independent search branches using…
The adoption of the distributed paradigm has allowed applications to increase their scalability, robustness and fault tolerance, but it has also complicated their structure, leading to an exponential growth of the applications'…
Decision diagrams for classification have some notable advantages over decision trees, as their internal connections can be determined at training time and their width is not bound to grow exponentially with their depth. Accordingly,…
Decision trees are popular machine learning models that are simple to build and easy to interpret. Even though algorithms to learn decision trees date back to almost 50 years, key properties affecting their generalization error are still…
Trees are useful entities allowing to model data structures and hierarchical relationships in networked decision systems ubiquitously. An ordered tree is a rooted tree where the order of the subtrees (children) of a node is significant. In…
Probabilistic programming languages and other machine learning applications often require samples to be generated from a categorical distribution where the probability of each one of $n$ categories is specified as a parameter. If the…
Survival analysis studies and predicts the time of death, or other singular unrepeated events, based on historical data, while the true time of death for some instances is unknown. Survival trees enable the discovery of complex nonlinear…
Decision trees are widely used for interpretable machine learning due to their clearly structured reasoning process. However, this structure belies a challenge we refer to as predictive equivalence: a given tree's decision boundary can be…