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 Ensemble Learning


Data-Aware and Scalable Sensitivity Analysis for Decision Tree Ensembles

Varshney, Namrita, Gupta, Ashutosh, Ahmad, Arhaan, Tayal, Tanay V., Akshay, S.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Decision tree ensembles are widely used in critical domains, making robustness and sensitivity analysis essential to their trustworthiness. We study the feature sensitivity problem, which asks whether an ensemble is sensitive to a specified subset of features -- such as protected attributes -- whose manipulation can alter model predictions. Existing approaches often yield examples of sensitivity that lie far from the training distribution, limiting their interpretability and practical value. We propose a data-aware sensitivity framework that constrains the sensitive examples to remain close to the dataset, thereby producing realistic and interpretable evidence of model weaknesses. To this end, we develop novel techniques for data-aware search using a combination of mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) encodings. Our contributions are fourfold. First, we strengthen the NP-hardness result for sensitivity verification, showing it holds even for trees of depth 1. Second, we develop MILP-optimizations that significantly speed up sensitivity verification for single ensembles and for the first time can also handle multiclass tree ensembles. Third, we introduce a data-aware framework generating realistic examples close to the training distribution. Finally, we conduct an extensive experimental evaluation on large tree ensembles, demonstrating scalability to ensembles with up to 800 trees of depth 8, achieving substantial improvements over the state of the art. This framework provides a practical foundation for analyzing the reliability and fairness of tree-based models in high-stakes applications.




On the Convergence of Multicalibration Gradient Boosting

Haimovich, Daniel, Linder, Fridolin, Perini, Lorenzo, Tax, Niek, Vojnovic, Milan

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multicalibration gradient boosting has recently emerged as a scalable method that empirically produces approximately multicalibrated predictors and has been deployed at web scale. Despite this empirical success, its convergence properties are not well understood. In this paper, we bridge the gap by providing convergence guarantees for multicalibration gradient boosting in regression with squared-error loss. We show that the magnitude of successive prediction updates decays at $O(1/\sqrt{T})$, which implies the same convergence rate bound for the multicalibration error over rounds. Under additional smoothness assumptions on the weak learners, this rate improves to linear convergence. We further analyze adaptive variants, showing local quadratic convergence of the training loss, and we study rescaling schemes that preserve convergence. Experiments on real-world datasets support our theory and clarify the regimes in which the method achieves fast convergence and strong multicalibration.