SORTeD Rashomon Sets of Sparse Decision Trees: Anytime Enumeration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Arslan, Elif, van der Linden, Jacobus G. M., Hoogendoorn, Serge, Rinaldi, Marco, Demirović, Emir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Arslan, Elif
van der Linden, Jacobus G. M.
Hoogendoorn, Serge
Rinaldi, Marco
Demirović, Emir
author_facet Arslan, Elif
van der Linden, Jacobus G. M.
Hoogendoorn, Serge
Rinaldi, Marco
Demirović, Emir
contents Sparse decision tree learning provides accurate and interpretable predictive models that are ideal for high-stakes applications by finding the single most accurate tree within a (soft) size limit. Rather than relying on a single "best" tree, Rashomon sets-trees with similar performance but varying structures-can be used to enhance variable importance analysis, enrich explanations, and enable users to choose simpler trees or those that satisfy stakeholder preferences (e.g., fairness) without hard-coding such criteria into the objective function. However, because finding the optimal tree is NP-hard, enumerating the Rashomon set is inherently challenging. Therefore, we introduce SORTD, a novel framework that improves scalability and enumerates trees in the Rashomon set in order of the objective value, thus offering anytime behavior. Our experiments show that SORTD reduces runtime by up to two orders of magnitude compared with the state of the art. Moreover, SORTD can compute Rashomon sets for any separable and totally ordered objective and supports post-evaluating the set using other separable (and partially ordered) objectives. Together, these advances make exploring Rashomon sets more practical in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SORTeD Rashomon Sets of Sparse Decision Trees: Anytime Enumeration
Arslan, Elif
van der Linden, Jacobus G. M.
Hoogendoorn, Serge
Rinaldi, Marco
Demirović, Emir
Machine Learning
Sparse decision tree learning provides accurate and interpretable predictive models that are ideal for high-stakes applications by finding the single most accurate tree within a (soft) size limit. Rather than relying on a single "best" tree, Rashomon sets-trees with similar performance but varying structures-can be used to enhance variable importance analysis, enrich explanations, and enable users to choose simpler trees or those that satisfy stakeholder preferences (e.g., fairness) without hard-coding such criteria into the objective function. However, because finding the optimal tree is NP-hard, enumerating the Rashomon set is inherently challenging. Therefore, we introduce SORTD, a novel framework that improves scalability and enumerates trees in the Rashomon set in order of the objective value, thus offering anytime behavior. Our experiments show that SORTD reduces runtime by up to two orders of magnitude compared with the state of the art. Moreover, SORTD can compute Rashomon sets for any separable and totally ordered objective and supports post-evaluating the set using other separable (and partially ordered) objectives. Together, these advances make exploring Rashomon sets more practical in real-world applications.
title SORTeD Rashomon Sets of Sparse Decision Trees: Anytime Enumeration
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03344