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Simplest Streaming Trees (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Nov 2, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: When new data arrives, it keeps growing the existing trees and swaps old ones for new ones to keep the forest size fixed. Across 72 classification problems it matched or beat batch forests, without accuracy drops or heavy memory use of earlier streaming versions.

Abstract · Extremely Simple Streaming Forest

Decision forests, including random forests and gradient boosting trees, remain the leading machine learning methods for many real-world data problems, especially on tabular data. However, most of the current implementations only operate in batch mode, and therefore cannot incrementally update when more data arrive. Several previous works developed streaming trees and ensembles to overcome this limitation. Nonetheless, we found that those state-of-the-art algorithms suffer from a number of drawbacks, including low accuracy on some problems and high memory usage on others. We therefore developed an extremely simple extension of decision trees: given new data, simply update existing trees by continuing to grow them, and replace some old trees with new ones to control the total number of trees. In a benchmark suite containing 72 classification problems (the OpenML-CC18 data suite), we illustrate that our approach, $\textit{Extremely Simple Streaming Forest}$ (XForest), does not suffer from either of the aforementioned limitations. On those datasets, we also demonstrate that our approach often performs as well as, and sometimes even better than, conventional batch decision forest algorithms. With a $\textit{zero-added-node}$ approach, XForest-Zero, we also further extend existing splits to new tasks, and this very efficient method only requires inference time. Thus, XForests establish a simple standard for streaming trees and forests that could readily be applied to many real-world problems.

Haoyin Xu, Jayanta Dey, Sambit Panda, Joshua T. Vogelstein
arXiv:2110.08483 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DS · submitted Oct 16, 2021 · updated Jun 26, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at The Fourth Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents - CoLLAs 2025

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