In plain words: Instead of greedily growing a tree or sampling candidates, it finds the single tree that best fits the data while staying simple. On 16 real datasets it matched or beat standard trees with far smaller ones, and proved its tree is the best possible.
Abstract
Decision trees remain one of the most popular machine learning models today, largely due to their out-of-the-box performance and interpretability. In this work, we present a Bayesian approach to decision tree induction via maximum a posteriori inference of a posterior distribution over trees. We first demonstrate a connection between maximum a posteriori inference of decision trees and AND/OR search. Using this connection, we propose an AND/OR search algorithm, dubbed MAPTree, which is able to recover the maximum a posteriori tree. Lastly, we demonstrate the empirical performance of the maximum a posteriori tree both on synthetic data and in real world settings. On 16 real world datasets, MAPTree either outperforms baselines or demonstrates comparable performance but with much smaller trees. On a synthetic dataset, MAPTree also demonstrates greater robustness to noise and better generalization than existing approaches. Finally, MAPTree recovers the maxiumum a posteriori tree faster than existing sampling approaches and, in contrast with those algorithms, is able to provide a certificate of optimality. The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/ThrunGroup/maptree.
Colin Sullivan, Mo Tiwari, Sebastian Thrun
arXiv:2309.15312 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Sep 26, 2023 · updated Dec 20, 2023
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