Branches: Efficiently Seeking Optimal Sparse Decision Trees with AO*

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chaouki, Ayman, Read, Jesse, Bifet, Albert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
author_facet Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
contents Decision Tree (DT) Learning is a fundamental problem in Interpretable Machine Learning, yet it poses a formidable optimisation challenge. Practical algorithms have recently emerged, primarily leveraging Dynamic Programming and Branch & Bound. However, most of these approaches rely on a Depth-First-Search strategy, which is inefficient when searching for DTs at high depths and requires the definition of a maximum depth hyperparameter. Best-First-Search was also employed by other methods to circumvent these issues. The downside of this strategy is its higher memory consumption, as such, it has to be designed in a fully efficient manner that takes full advantage of the problem's structure. We formulate the problem within an AND/OR graph search framework and we solve it with a novel AO*-type algorithm called Branches. We prove both optimality and complexity guarantees for Branches and we show that it is more efficient than the state of the art theoretically and on a variety of experiments. Furthermore, Branches supports non-binary features unlike the other methods, we show that this property can further induce larger gains in computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02175
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Branches: Efficiently Seeking Optimal Sparse Decision Trees with AO*
Chaouki, Ayman
Read, Jesse
Bifet, Albert
Machine Learning
Decision Tree (DT) Learning is a fundamental problem in Interpretable Machine Learning, yet it poses a formidable optimisation challenge. Practical algorithms have recently emerged, primarily leveraging Dynamic Programming and Branch & Bound. However, most of these approaches rely on a Depth-First-Search strategy, which is inefficient when searching for DTs at high depths and requires the definition of a maximum depth hyperparameter. Best-First-Search was also employed by other methods to circumvent these issues. The downside of this strategy is its higher memory consumption, as such, it has to be designed in a fully efficient manner that takes full advantage of the problem's structure. We formulate the problem within an AND/OR graph search framework and we solve it with a novel AO*-type algorithm called Branches. We prove both optimality and complexity guarantees for Branches and we show that it is more efficient than the state of the art theoretically and on a variety of experiments. Furthermore, Branches supports non-binary features unlike the other methods, we show that this property can further induce larger gains in computational efficiency.
title Branches: Efficiently Seeking Optimal Sparse Decision Trees with AO*
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02175