English

Tree-Structured Boosting: Connections Between Gradient Boosted Stumps and Full Decision Trees

Machine Learning 2017-11-21 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Additive models, such as produced by gradient boosting, and full interaction models, such as classification and regression trees (CART), are widely used algorithms that have been investigated largely in isolation. We show that these models exist along a spectrum, revealing never-before-known connections between these two approaches. This paper introduces a novel technique called tree-structured boosting for creating a single decision tree, and shows that this method can produce models equivalent to CART or gradient boosted stumps at the extremes by varying a single parameter. Although tree-structured boosting is designed primarily to provide both the model interpretability and predictive performance needed for high-stake applications like medicine, it also can produce decision trees represented by hybrid models between CART and boosted stumps that can outperform either of these approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.06793,
  title  = {Tree-Structured Boosting: Connections Between Gradient Boosted Stumps and Full Decision Trees},
  author = {José Marcio Luna and Eric Eaton and Lyle H. Ungar and Eric Diffenderfer and Shane T. Jensen and Efstathios D. Gennatas and Mateo Wirth and Charles B. Simone and Timothy D. Solberg and Gilmer Valdes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.06793},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Presented at NIPS 2017 Symposium on Interpretable Machine Learning

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:50:07.341Z