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arXiv · 1805.07592

Adaptively Pruning Features for Boosted Decision Trees

Maryam Aziz·Jesse Anderton·Javed Aslam
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Abstract

Boosted decision trees enjoy popularity in a variety of applications; however, for large-scale datasets, the cost of training a decision tree in each round can be prohibitively expensive. Inspired by ideas from the multi-arm bandit literature, we develop a highly efficient algorithm for computing exact greedy-optimal decision trees, outperforming the state-of-the-art Quick Boost method. We further develop a framework for deriving lower bounds on the problem that applies to a wide family of conceivable algorithms for the task (including our algorithm and Quick Boost), and we demonstrate empirically on a wide variety of data sets that our algorithm is near-optimal within this family of algorithms. We also derive a lower bound applicable to any algorithm solving the task, and we demonstrate that our algorithm empirically achieves performance close to this best-achievable lower bound.

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Maryam Aziz, Jesse Anderton, Javed Aslam. 2018-05-19. Adaptively Pruning Features for Boosted Decision Trees. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07592

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