Online Learning of Decision Trees with Thompson Sampling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chaouki, Ayman, Read, Jesse, Bifet, Albert
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
author_facet Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
contents Decision Trees are prominent prediction models for interpretable Machine Learning. They have been thoroughly researched, mostly in the batch setting with a fixed labelled dataset, leading to popular algorithms such as C4.5, ID3 and CART. Unfortunately, these methods are of heuristic nature, they rely on greedy splits offering no guarantees of global optimality and often leading to unnecessarily complex and hard-to-interpret Decision Trees. Recent breakthroughs addressed this suboptimality issue in the batch setting, but no such work has considered the online setting with data arriving in a stream. To this end, we devise a new Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm, Thompson Sampling Decision Trees (TSDT), able to produce optimal Decision Trees in an online setting. We analyse our algorithm and prove its almost sure convergence to the optimal tree. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to validate our findings empirically. The proposed TSDT outperforms existing algorithms on several benchmarks, all while presenting the practical advantage of being tailored to the online setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06403
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Learning of Decision Trees with Thompson Sampling
Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
Machine Learning
Decision Trees are prominent prediction models for interpretable Machine Learning. They have been thoroughly researched, mostly in the batch setting with a fixed labelled dataset, leading to popular algorithms such as C4.5, ID3 and CART. Unfortunately, these methods are of heuristic nature, they rely on greedy splits offering no guarantees of global optimality and often leading to unnecessarily complex and hard-to-interpret Decision Trees. Recent breakthroughs addressed this suboptimality issue in the batch setting, but no such work has considered the online setting with data arriving in a stream. To this end, we devise a new Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm, Thompson Sampling Decision Trees (TSDT), able to produce optimal Decision Trees in an online setting. We analyse our algorithm and prove its almost sure convergence to the optimal tree. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to validate our findings empirically. The proposed TSDT outperforms existing algorithms on several benchmarks, all while presenting the practical advantage of being tailored to the online setting.
title Online Learning of Decision Trees with Thompson Sampling
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06403