As a modern ensemble technique, Deep Forest (DF) employs a cascading structure to construct deep models, providing stronger representational power compared to traditional decision forests. However, its greedy multi-layer learning procedure is prone to overfitting, limiting model effectiveness and generalizability. This paper presents an optimized Deep Forest, featuring learnable, layerwise data augmentation policy schedules. Specifically, We introduce the Cut Mix for Tabular data (CMT) augmentation technique to mitigate overfitting and develop a population-based search algorithm to tailor augmentation intensity for each layer. Additionally, we propose to incorporate outputs from intermediate layers into a checkpoint ensemble for more stable performance. Experimental results show that our method sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks in various tabular classification tasks, outperforming shallow tree ensembles, deep forests, deep neural network, and AutoML competitors. The learned policies also transfer effectively to Deep Forest variants, underscoring its potential for enhancing non-differentiable deep learning modules in tabular signal processing.

Effect of Population Based Augmentation applied to images, which differs at different percentages into training. In this blog post we introduce Population Based Augmentation (PBA), an algorithm that quickly and efficiently learns a state-of-the-art approach to augmenting data for neural network training. PBA matches the previous best result on CIFAR and SVHN but uses one thousand times less compute, enabling researchers and practitioners to effectively learn new augmentation policies using a single workstation GPU. You can use PBA broadly to improve deep learning performance on image recognition tasks. We discuss the PBA results from our recent paper and then show how to easily run PBA for yourself on a new data set in the Tune framework.

In this blog post we introduce Population Based Augmentation (PBA), an algorithm that quickly and efficiently learns a state-of-the-art approach to augmenting data for neural network training. PBA matches the previous best result on CIFAR and SVHN but uses one thousand times less compute, enabling researchers and practitioners to effectively learn new augmentation policies using a single workstation GPU. You can use PBA broadly to improve deep learning performance on image recognition tasks. We discuss the PBA results from our recent paper and then show how to easily run PBA for yourself on a new data set in the Tune framework. Recent advances in deep learning models have been largely attributed to the quantity and diversity of data gathered in recent years.