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Optimally Pruning Decision Tree Ensembles With Feature Cost

Feng Nan,Joseph Wang,Venkatesh Saligrama

Published 2016 in arXiv.org

ABSTRACT

We consider the problem of learning decision rules for prediction with feature budget constraint. In particular, we are interested in pruning an ensemble of decision trees to reduce expected feature cost while maintaining high prediction accuracy for any test example. We propose a novel 0-1 integer program formulation for ensemble pruning. Our pruning formulation is general - it takes any ensemble of decision trees as input. By explicitly accounting for feature-sharing across trees together with accuracy/cost trade-off, our method is able to significantly reduce feature cost by pruning subtrees that introduce more loss in terms of feature cost than benefit in terms of prediction accuracy gain. Theoretically, we prove that a linear programming relaxation produces the exact solution of the original integer program. This allows us to use efficient convex optimization tools to obtain an optimally pruned ensemble for any given budget. Empirically, we see that our pruning algorithm significantly improves the performance of the state of the art ensemble method BudgetRF.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2016

  • Venue

    arXiv.org

  • Publication date

    2016-01-05

  • Fields of study

    Mathematics, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    arXiv 1601.00955
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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