In plain words: A decision tree is built inside a neural network, so it keeps easy-to-read rules but is trained by gradual error correction instead of greedy step-by-step splitting. On tabular data it worked well and automatically dropped unneeded splits and features.
Abstract
Deep neural networks have been proven powerful at processing perceptual data, such as images and audio. However for tabular data, tree-based models are more popular. A nice property of tree-based models is their natural interpretability. In this work, we present Deep Neural Decision Trees (DNDT) -- tree models realised by neural networks. A DNDT is intrinsically interpretable, as it is a tree. Yet as it is also a neural network (NN), it can be easily implemented in NN toolkits, and trained with gradient descent rather than greedy splitting. We evaluate DNDT on several tabular datasets, verify its efficacy, and investigate similarities and differences between DNDT and vanilla decision trees. Interestingly, DNDT self-prunes at both split and feature-level.
Yongxin Yang, Irene Garcia Morillo, Timothy M. Hospedales
arXiv:1806.06988 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jun 19, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · presented at 2018 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2018), Stockholm, Sweden