Early Stopping for Regression Trees

Ratmir Miftachov; Markus Reiß

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arXiv · 2502.04709

Early Stopping for Regression Trees

Ratmir Miftachov·Markus Reiß

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Abstract

We develop early stopping rules for growing regression tree estimators. The fully data-driven stopping rule is based on monitoring the global residual norm. The best-first search and the breadth-first search algorithms together with linear interpolation give rise to generalized projection or regularization flows. A general theory of early stopping is established. Oracle inequalities for the early-stopped regression tree are derived without any smoothness assumption on the regression function, assuming the original CART splitting rule, yet with a much broader scope. The remainder terms are of smaller order than the best achievable rates for Lipschitz functions in dimension $d\ge 2$. In real and synthetic data the early stopping regression tree estimators attain the statistical performance of cost-complexity pruning while significantly reducing computational costs.

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Ratmir Miftachov, Markus Reiß. 2025-02-07. Early Stopping for Regression Trees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04709

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