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 decision rule


Minimaxity and Admissibility of Bayesian Neural Networks

Coulson, Daniel Andrew, Wells, Martin T.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) offer a natural probabilistic formulation for inference in deep learning models. Despite their popularity, their optimality has received limited attention through the lens of statistical decision theory. In this paper, we study decision rules induced by deep, fully connected feedforward ReLU BNNs in the normal location model under quadratic loss. We show that, for fixed prior scales, the induced Bayes decision rule is not minimax. We then propose a hyperprior on the effective output variance of the BNN prior that yields a superharmonic square-root marginal density, establishing that the resulting decision rule is simultaneously admissible and minimax. We further extend these results from the quadratic loss setting to the predictive density estimation problem with Kullback--Leibler loss. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings numerically through simulation.



Feature Learning for Interpretable, Performant Decision Trees

Neural Information Processing Systems

Points were sampled uniformly in the bands denoted by dashed lines. We posit that these barriers are due, at least in part, to the sensitivity of decision trees to transformations of the input resulting from greedy construction and simple decision rules. Of these, key limitation is the latter; even if we replace greedy construction with a perfect tree learner, simple distributions can nonetheless require an arbitrarily large axis-aligned tree to fit.






Linear TreeShap Peng Yu

Neural Information Processing Systems

Decision trees are well-known due to their ease of interpretability. To improve accuracy, we need to grow deep trees or ensembles of trees. These are hard to interpret, offsetting their original benefits. Shapley values have recently become a popular way to explain the predictions of tree-based machine learning models. It provides a linear weighting to features independent of the tree structure. The rise in popularity is mainly due to TreeShap, which solves a general exponential complexity problem in polynomial time. Following extensive adoption in the industry, more efficient algorithms are required. This paper presents a more efficient and straightforward algorithm: Linear TreeShap. Like TreeShap, Linear TreeShap is exact and requires the same amount of memory.



R-learninginactor-criticmodeloffersabiologically relevantmechanismforsequentialdecision-making

Neural Information Processing Systems

Afewstudies haveexplored sequential stay-or-leavedecisions in humans, or rodents - the model organism used to access neuronal activity at high resolution. In both cases, decision patterns were collected inforaging tasks-the experimental settings where subjects decide when to leave depleting resources (2).