Off the Beaten path – Using Deep Forests to Outperform CNNs and RNNs

Summary: How about a deep learning technique based on decision trees that outperforms CNNs and RNNs, runs on your ordinary desktop, and trains with relatively small datasets. This could be a major disruptor for AI. Suppose I told you that there is an algorithm that regularly beats the performance of CNNs and RNNs at image and text classification. Well there is one just announced by researchers Zhi-Hua Zhou and Ji Feng of the National Key Lab for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. This is the first installment in a series of "Off the Beaten Path" articles that will focus on methods that advance data science that are off the mainstream of development.