A decision tree is a non-parametric supervised machine learning algorithm. It is extremely useful in classifying or labels the object. It works for both categorical and continuous datasets. It is like a tree structure in which the root node and its child node should be present. It has a child node that denotes a feature of the dataset. Prediction can be made with a leaf or terminal node.

We study the problem of balancing effectiveness and efficiency in automated feature selection. After exploring many feature selection methods, we observe a computational dilemma: 1) traditional feature selection is mostly efficient, but difficult to identify the best subset; 2) the emerging reinforced feature selection automatically navigates to the best subset, but is usually inefficient. Can we bridge the gap between effectiveness and efficiency under automation? Motivated by this dilemma, we aim to develop a novel feature space navigation method. In our preliminary work, we leveraged interactive reinforcement learning to accelerate feature selection by external trainer-agent interaction. In this journal version, we propose a novel interactive and closed-loop architecture to simultaneously model interactive reinforcement learning (IRL) and decision tree feedback (DTF). Specifically, IRL is to create an interactive feature selection loop and DTF is to feed structured feature knowledge back to the loop. First, the tree-structured feature hierarchy from decision tree is leveraged to improve state representation. In particular, we represent the selected feature subset as an undirected graph of feature-feature correlations and a directed tree of decision features. We propose a new embedding method capable of empowering graph convolutional network to jointly learn state representation from both the graph and the tree. Second, the tree-structured feature hierarchy is exploited to develop a new reward scheme. In particular, we personalize reward assignment of agents based on decision tree feature importance. In addition, observing agents' actions can be feedback, we devise another reward scheme, to weigh and assign reward based on the feature selected frequency ratio in historical action records. Finally, we present extensive experiments on real-world datasets to show the improved performance.

This story will introduce yet another implementation of Decision Trees, which I wrote as part of my thesis. Firstly, I will try to motivate why I have decided to take my time to come up with an own implementation of Decision Trees; I will list some of its features but also will list the disadvantages of the current implementation. Secondly, I will guide you through the basic usage of HDTree using code snippets and explaining some details along the way. Lastly, there will be some hints on how to customize and extend the HDTree with your own chunks of ideas. However, this article will not guide you through all of the basics of Decision Trees. There are really plenty of resources out there [1][2][3][16].

Mislabeled samples are ubiquitous in real-world datasets as rule-based or expert labeling is usually based on incorrect assumptions or subject to biased opinions. Neural networks can "memorize" these mislabeled samples and, as a result, exhibit poor generalization. This poses a critical issue in fault detection applications, where not only the training but also the validation datasets are prone to contain mislabeled samples. In this work, we propose a novel two-step framework for robust training with label noise. In the first step, we identify outliers (including the mislabeled samples) based on the update in the hypothesis space. In the second step, we propose different approaches to modifying the training data based on the identified outliers and a data augmentation technique. Contrary to previous approaches, we aim at finding a robust solution that is suitable for real-world applications, such as fault detection, where no clean, "noise-free" validation dataset is available. Under an approximate assumption about the upper limit of the label noise, we significantly improve the generalization ability of the model trained under massive label noise.

New research finds that causal machine learning models are not only more accurate than previous AI-based symptom checkers for patient diagnosis but, in many cases, can now exceed the diagnosis accuracy of human doctors. That's mainly due to the methods used, which allow for a more "outside the box" creativity in diagnosis, and even more improved accuracy for more complex patient illness. In the peer-reviewed study, authored by researchers from Babylon Health and University College London, the new model scored higher than 72% of general practitioner doctors when tasked with diagnosing written test cases of realistic illnesses. Up until now, and despite significant research efforts, the report claims, diagnostic algorithms have struggled to achieve the diagnosis accuracy of doctors. That's because machine learning algorithms have attempted to follow the same process as doctors in symptom checking.

Various model-based diagnosis scenarios require the computation of the most preferred fault explanations. Existing algorithms that are sound (i.e., output only actual fault explanations) and complete (i.e., can return all explanations), however, require exponential space to achieve this task. As a remedy, to enable successful diagnosis on memory-restricted devices and for memory-intensive problem cases, we propose RBF-HS, a diagnostic search method based on Korf's well-known RBFS algorithm. RBF-HS can enumerate an arbitrary fixed number of fault explanations in best-first order within linear space bounds, without sacrificing the desirable soundness or completeness properties. Evaluations using real-world diagnosis cases show that RBF-HS, when used to compute minimum-cardinality fault explanations, in most cases saves substantial space (up to 98 %) while requiring only reasonably more or even less time than Reiter's HS-Tree, a commonly used and as generally applicable sound, complete and best-first diagnosis search.

Statistical samples, in order to be representative, have to be drawn from a population in a random and unbiased way. Nevertheless, it is common practice in the field of model-based diagnosis to make estimations from (biased) best-first samples. One example is the computation of a few most probable possible fault explanations for a defective system and the use of these to assess which aspect of the system, if measured, would bring the highest information gain. In this work, we scrutinize whether these statistically not well-founded conventions, that both diagnosis researchers and practitioners have adhered to for decades, are indeed reasonable. To this end, we empirically analyze various sampling methods that generate fault explanations. We study the representativeness of the produced samples in terms of their estimations about fault explanations and how well they guide diagnostic decisions, and we investigate the impact of sample size, the optimal trade-off between sampling efficiency and effectivity, and how approximate sampling techniques compare to exact ones.

So now that we've covered the basics of machine learning with regression models, let's move onto something a little more sophisticated: Decision Trees. What is a decision tree you ask? A decision tree is a set of questions you can ask to classify different data points. It's called a tree because it's in a tree like shape, just inverted. If you've got the weather forecast for the day, it'd be pretty easy to look at it and determine if you'd want to go play tennis that day.

A common issue for companies is that the volume of product orders may at times exceed the production capacity. We formally introduce two novel problems dealing with the question which orders to discard or postpone in order to meet certain (timeliness) goals, and try to approach them by means of model-based diagnosis. In thorough analyses, we identify many similarities of the introduced problems to diagnosis problems, but also reveal crucial idiosyncracies and outline ways to handle or leverage them. Finally, a proof-of-concept evaluation on industrial-scale problem instances from a well-known scheduling benchmark suite demonstrates that one of the two formalized problems can be well attacked by out-of-the-box model-based diagnosis tools.

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