Born-again tree ensembles. Vidal, T. & Schiffer, M. In III, H., D. & Singh, A., editors, ICML'20, volume 119, of Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, pages 9743-9753, 2020. PMLR.
Born-again tree ensembles [link]Website  abstract   bibtex   2 downloads  
The use of machine learning algorithms in finance, medicine, and criminal justice can deeply impact human lives. As a consequence, research into interpretable machine learning has rapidly grown in an attempt to better control and fix possible sources of mistakes and biases. Tree ensembles, in particular, offer a good prediction quality in various domains, but the concurrent use of multiple trees reduces the interpretability of the ensemble. Against this background, we study born-again tree ensembles, i.e., the process of constructing a single decision tree of minimum size that reproduces the exact same behavior as a given tree ensemble in its entire feature space. To find such a tree, we develop a dynamic-programming based algorithm that exploits sophisticated pruning and bounding rules to reduce the number of recursive calls. This algorithm generates optimal born-again trees for many datasets of practical interest, leading to classifiers which are typically simpler and more interpretable without any other form of compromise.
@inproceedings{
 title = {Born-again tree ensembles},
 type = {inproceedings},
 year = {2020},
 pages = {9743-9753},
 volume = {119},
 websites = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/vidal20a.html},
 publisher = {PMLR},
 city = {Virtual},
 series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
 id = {c20200b9-20b6-3024-b8e5-da5ef302e63a},
 created = {2020-12-11T17:34:06.153Z},
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 last_modified = {2024-03-03T18:42:12.142Z},
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 abstract = {The use of machine learning algorithms in finance, medicine, and criminal justice can deeply impact human lives. As a consequence, research into interpretable machine learning has rapidly grown in an attempt to better control and fix possible sources of mistakes and biases. Tree ensembles, in particular, offer a good prediction quality in various domains, but the concurrent use of multiple trees reduces the interpretability of the ensemble. Against this background, we study born-again tree ensembles, i.e., the process of constructing a single decision tree of minimum size that reproduces the exact same behavior as a given tree ensemble in its entire feature space. To find such a tree, we develop a dynamic-programming based algorithm that exploits sophisticated pruning and bounding rules to reduce the number of recursive calls. This algorithm generates optimal born-again trees for many datasets of practical interest, leading to classifiers which are typically simpler and more interpretable without any other form of compromise.},
 bibtype = {inproceedings},
 author = {Vidal, T. and Schiffer, M.},
 editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti},
 booktitle = {ICML'20}
}

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