Decision trees and randomized forests are widely used in computer vision and machine learning. This greedy procedure often leads to suboptimal trees. In this paper, we present an algorithm for optimizing the split functions at all levels of the tree jointly with the leaf parameters, based on a global objective. We show that the problem of finding optimal linear-combination (oblique) splits for decision trees is related to structured prediction with latent variables, and we formulate a convex-concave upper bound on the tree's empirical loss. Computing the gradient of the proposed surrogate objective with respect to each training exemplar is O(d 2), where d is the tree depth, and thus training deep trees is feasible.

Decision tree (and its extensions such as Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and Random Forest) is a widely used machine learning algorithm, due to its practical effectiveness and model interpretability. With the emergence of big data, there is an increasing need to parallelize the training process of decision tree. However, most existing attempts along this line suffer from high communication costs. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called \emph{Parallel Voting Decision Tree (PV-Tree)}, to tackle this challenge. After partitioning the training data onto a number of (e.g., $M$) machines, this algorithm performs both local voting and global voting in each iteration. For local voting, the top-$k$ attributes are selected from each machine according to its local data.

Learning a decision tree from data is a difficult optimization problem. The most widespread algorithm in practice, dating to the 1980s, is based on a greedy growth of the tree structure by recursively splitting nodes, and possibly pruning back the final tree. The parameters (decision function) of an internal node are approximately estimated by minimizing an impurity measure. We give an algorithm that, given an input tree (its structure and the parameter values at its nodes), produces a new tree with the same or smaller structure but new parameter values that provably lower or leave unchanged the misclassification error. This can be applied to both axis-aligned and oblique trees and our experiments show it consistently outperforms various other algorithms while being highly scalable to large datasets and trees.

Decision trees and random forests are well established models that not only offer good predictive performance, but also provide rich feature importance information. While practitioners often employ variable importance methods that rely on this impurity-based information, these methods remain poorly characterized from a theoretical perspective. We provide novel insights into the performance of these methods by deriving finite sample performance guarantees in a high-dimensional setting under various modeling assumptions. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of these impurity-based methods via an extensive set of simulations. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

With the rapid development of manufacturing industry, machine fault diagnosis has become increasingly significant to ensure safe equipment operation and production. Consequently, multifarious approaches have been explored and developed in the past years, of which intelligent algorithms develop particularly rapidly. Convolutional neural network, as a typical representative of intelligent diagnostic models, has been extensively studied and applied in recent five years, and a large amount of literature has been published in academic journals and conference proceedings. However, there has not been a systematic review to cover these studies and make a prospect for the further research. To fill in this gap, this work attempts to review and summarize the development of the Convolutional Network based Fault Diagnosis (CNFD) approaches comprehensively. Generally, a typical CNFD framework is composed of the following steps, namely, data collection, model construction, and feature learning and decision making, thus this paper is organized by following this stream. Firstly, data collection process is described, in which several popular datasets are introduced. Then, the fundamental theory from the basic convolutional neural network to its variants is elaborated. After that, the applications of CNFD are reviewed in terms of three mainstream directions, i.e. classification, prediction and transfer diagnosis. Finally, conclusions and prospects are presented to point out the characteristics of current development, facing challenges and future trends. Last but not least, it is expected that this work would provide convenience and inspire further exploration for researchers in this field.

Causal models could increase interpretability, robustness to distributional shift and sample efficiency of RL agents. In this vein, we address the question of learning a causal model of an RL environment. This problem is known to be difficult due to spurious correlations. We overcome this difficulty by rewarding an RL agent for designing and executing interventions to discover the true model. We compare rewarding the agent for disproving uncertain edges in the causal graph, rewarding the agent for activating a certain node, or rewarding the agent for increasing the causal graph loss. We show that our methods result in a better causal graph than one generated by following the random policy, or a policy trained on the environment's reward. We find that rewarding for the causal graph loss works the best.

The decision tree algorithm is effective for balanced classification, although it does not perform well on imbalanced datasets. The split points of the tree are chosen to best separate examples into two groups with minimum mixing. When both groups are dominated by examples from one class, the criterion used to select a split point will see good separation, when in fact, the examples from the minority class are being ignored. This problem can be overcome by modifying the criterion used to evaluate split points to take the importance of each class into account, referred to generally as the weighted split-point or weighted decision tree. In this tutorial, you will discover the weighted decision tree for imbalanced classification.

Decision Trees are popular Machine Learning algorithms used for both regression and classification tasks. Their popularity mainly arises from their interpretability and representability, as they mimic the way the human brain takes decisions. However, to be interpretable, they pay a price in terms of prediction accuracy. To overcome this caveat, some techniques have been developed, with the goal of creating strong and robust models starting from'poor' models. Those techniques are known as'ensemble' methods and, in this article, I'm going to talk about three of them: Bagging, Random Forest and Boosting.

Data gathered from multiple sensors can be effectively fused for accurate monitoring of many engineering applications. In the last few years, one of the most sought after applications for multi sensor fusion has been fault diagnosis. Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence along with Dempsters Combination Rule is a very popular method for multi sensor fusion which can be successfully applied to fault diagnosis. But if the information obtained from the different sensors shows high conflict, the classical Dempsters Combination Rule may produce counter-intuitive result. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper proposes an improved combination rule for multi sensor data fusion. Numerical examples have been put forward to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparative analysis has also been carried out with existing methods to show the superiority of the proposed method in multi sensor fault diagnosis.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Learn how to implement a decision tree using the Python programming language. You will learn how to train and display you implementation of the decision tree classifier.