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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pattie, William, Krishna, Arvind
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05597
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author Pattie, William
Krishna, Arvind
author_facet Pattie, William
Krishna, Arvind
contents Decision trees are powerful for predictive modeling but often suffer from high variance when modeling continuous relationships. While algorithms like Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) excel at capturing such continuous relationships, they perform poorly when modeling discontinuities. To address the limitations of both approaches, we introduce Spline-based Multivariate Adaptive Regression Trees (SMART), which uses a decision tree to identify subsets of data with distinct continuous relationships and then leverages MARS to fit these relationships independently. Unlike other methods that rely on the tree structure to model interaction and higher-order terms, SMART leverages MARS's native ability to handle these terms, allowing the tree to focus solely on identifying discontinuities in the relationship. We test SMART on various datasets, demonstrating its improvement over state-of-the-art methods in such cases. Additionally, we provide an open-source implementation of our method to be used by practitioners.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_05597
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SMART: A Flexible Approach to Regression using Spline-Based Multivariate Adaptive Regression Trees
Pattie, William
Krishna, Arvind
Machine Learning
68T01
I.5.1; G.3
Decision trees are powerful for predictive modeling but often suffer from high variance when modeling continuous relationships. While algorithms like Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) excel at capturing such continuous relationships, they perform poorly when modeling discontinuities. To address the limitations of both approaches, we introduce Spline-based Multivariate Adaptive Regression Trees (SMART), which uses a decision tree to identify subsets of data with distinct continuous relationships and then leverages MARS to fit these relationships independently. Unlike other methods that rely on the tree structure to model interaction and higher-order terms, SMART leverages MARS's native ability to handle these terms, allowing the tree to focus solely on identifying discontinuities in the relationship. We test SMART on various datasets, demonstrating its improvement over state-of-the-art methods in such cases. Additionally, we provide an open-source implementation of our method to be used by practitioners.
title SMART: A Flexible Approach to Regression using Spline-Based Multivariate Adaptive Regression Trees
topic Machine Learning
68T01
I.5.1; G.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05597