TreeFlow: Going beyond Tree-based Gaussian Probabilistic Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wielopolski, Patryk, Zięba, Maciej
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Wielopolski, Patryk
Zięba, Maciej
author_facet Wielopolski, Patryk
Zięba, Maciej
contents The tree-based ensembles are known for their outstanding performance in classification and regression problems characterized by feature vectors represented by mixed-type variables from various ranges and domains. However, considering regression problems, they are primarily designed to provide deterministic responses or model the uncertainty of the output with Gaussian or parametric distribution. In this work, we introduce TreeFlow, the tree-based approach that combines the benefits of using tree ensembles with the capabilities of modeling flexible probability distributions using normalizing flows. The main idea of the solution is to use a tree-based model as a feature extractor and combine it with a conditional variant of normalizing flow. Consequently, our approach is capable of modeling complex distributions for the regression outputs. We evaluate the proposed method on challenging regression benchmarks with varying volume, feature characteristics, and target dimensionality. We obtain the SOTA results for both probabilistic and deterministic metrics on datasets with multi-modal target distributions and competitive results on unimodal ones compared to tree-based regression baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_04140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TreeFlow: Going beyond Tree-based Gaussian Probabilistic Regression
Wielopolski, Patryk
Zięba, Maciej
Machine Learning
The tree-based ensembles are known for their outstanding performance in classification and regression problems characterized by feature vectors represented by mixed-type variables from various ranges and domains. However, considering regression problems, they are primarily designed to provide deterministic responses or model the uncertainty of the output with Gaussian or parametric distribution. In this work, we introduce TreeFlow, the tree-based approach that combines the benefits of using tree ensembles with the capabilities of modeling flexible probability distributions using normalizing flows. The main idea of the solution is to use a tree-based model as a feature extractor and combine it with a conditional variant of normalizing flow. Consequently, our approach is capable of modeling complex distributions for the regression outputs. We evaluate the proposed method on challenging regression benchmarks with varying volume, feature characteristics, and target dimensionality. We obtain the SOTA results for both probabilistic and deterministic metrics on datasets with multi-modal target distributions and competitive results on unimodal ones compared to tree-based regression baselines.
title TreeFlow: Going beyond Tree-based Gaussian Probabilistic Regression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04140