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Main Authors: Chen, Ziheng, Huang, Jin, Cheng, Jiali, Guo, Yuchan, Wang, Mengjie, Morishetti, Lalitesh, Nag, Kaushiki, Amiri, Hadi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21181
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author Chen, Ziheng
Huang, Jin
Cheng, Jiali
Guo, Yuchan
Wang, Mengjie
Morishetti, Lalitesh
Nag, Kaushiki
Amiri, Hadi
author_facet Chen, Ziheng
Huang, Jin
Cheng, Jiali
Guo, Yuchan
Wang, Mengjie
Morishetti, Lalitesh
Nag, Kaushiki
Amiri, Hadi
contents Tree ensembles are widely recognized for their effectiveness in classification tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains, including bioinformatics, finance, and medical diagnosis. With increasing emphasis on data privacy and the \textit{right to be forgotten}, several unlearning algorithms have been proposed to enable tree ensembles to forget sensitive information. However, existing methods are often tailored to a particular model or rely on the discrete tree structure, making them difficult to generalize to complex ensembles and inefficient for large-scale datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FUTURE, a novel unlearning algorithm for tree ensembles. Specifically, we formulate the problem of forgetting samples as a gradient-based optimization task. In order to accommodate non-differentiability of tree ensembles, we adopt the probabilistic model approximations within the optimization framework. This enables end-to-end unlearning in an effective and efficient manner. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that FUTURE yields significant and successful unlearning performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FUTURE: Flexible Unlearning for Tree Ensemble
Chen, Ziheng
Huang, Jin
Cheng, Jiali
Guo, Yuchan
Wang, Mengjie
Morishetti, Lalitesh
Nag, Kaushiki
Amiri, Hadi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Tree ensembles are widely recognized for their effectiveness in classification tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains, including bioinformatics, finance, and medical diagnosis. With increasing emphasis on data privacy and the \textit{right to be forgotten}, several unlearning algorithms have been proposed to enable tree ensembles to forget sensitive information. However, existing methods are often tailored to a particular model or rely on the discrete tree structure, making them difficult to generalize to complex ensembles and inefficient for large-scale datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FUTURE, a novel unlearning algorithm for tree ensembles. Specifically, we formulate the problem of forgetting samples as a gradient-based optimization task. In order to accommodate non-differentiability of tree ensembles, we adopt the probabilistic model approximations within the optimization framework. This enables end-to-end unlearning in an effective and efficient manner. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that FUTURE yields significant and successful unlearning performance.
title FUTURE: Flexible Unlearning for Tree Ensemble
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21181