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Neural Networks Are Decision Trees (arxiv.org)
4 points by groar on Oct 17, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Any neural network can be rewritten exactly as a decision tree, with the same outputs and no loss of accuracy, making its decisions easier to follow. The conversion works for fully connected and convolutional networks, and for small ones the tree can run faster.

Abstract · Neural Networks are Decision Trees

In this manuscript, we show that any neural network with any activation function can be represented as a decision tree. The representation is equivalence and not an approximation, thus keeping the accuracy of the neural network exactly as is. We believe that this work provides better understanding of neural networks and paves the way to tackle their black-box nature. We share equivalent trees of some neural networks and show that besides providing interpretability, tree representation can also achieve some computational advantages for small networks. The analysis holds both for fully connected and convolutional networks, which may or may not also include skip connections and/or normalizations.

Caglar Aytekin
arXiv:2210.05189 · cs.LG · submitted Oct 11, 2022 · updated Oct 25, 2022
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Also discussed: Oct 2022 (34 points, 9 comments) · Oct 2022 (4 points, 0 comments) · Oct 2022 (3 points, 0 comments)

The author shows that any neural network having piece-wise linear activation functions can be represented as a decision tree
That's interesting. Is it still that the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is the prevailing activation function in deep neural networks, because of the the vanishing gradients with activation functions like tanh? If so the conclusions from the paper would apply to a very wide range of deep neural networks.