Standford U’s MAPTree: Redefining Decision Trees – Precision, Speed, and Efficiency Unleashed

Decision trees have emerged as one of the cornerstones of modern machine learning, celebrated for their effectiveness, versatility, and interpretability. Their popularity is undeniable, and any advancement in the field of decision tree modeling holds immense potential for widespread impact.

In a new paper MAPTree: Beating “Optimal” Decision Trees with Bayesian Decision Trees, a Stanford University research team introduces MAPTree, an algorithm that confidently uncovers the maximum a posteriori tree within Bayesian Classification and Regression Trees (BCART) posterior for a given dataset. In doing so, it not only surpasses existing benchmarks but also achieves comparable performance while producing significantly leaner and faster decision trees.

The team’s contributions can be distilled into the following key points:

1. Formalized Connection: The researchers establish a formal link between the maximum a posteriori inference of Bayesian Classification and Regression Trees (BCART) and AND/OR search problems, shedding light on the underlying structure of the problem.
2. MAPTree Algorithm: They propose the MAPTree algorithm, designed to navigate AND/OR graphs, and effectively retrieve the maximum a posteriori tree from the BCART posterior distribution over decision trees.
3. Enhanced Speed: MAPTree outpaces previous sampling-based techniques in terms of computational efficiency, promising quicker results for practitioners.
4. Performance Superiority: The trees identified by MAPTree either outperform the current state-of-the-art algorithms or exhibit comparable performance while maintaining a smaller footprint.
5. Practical Implementation: The team provides a highly optimized C++ implementation that can be seamlessly integrated with Python, ensuring accessibility for practitioners.

This research primarily focuses on the construction of individual decision trees. It challenges the notion of “optimal” decision trees, which frame decision tree induction as a global optimization problem aimed at maximizing a global objective function.

In this landscape, Bayesian Classification and Regression Trees (BCART) have risen as an advanced approach, introducing a posterior distribution over tree structures based on available data. This approach, in practice, tends to outshine conventional greedy methods by producing superior tree structures. However, it suffers from the drawback of having exponentially long mixing times and often getting trapped in local minima.

To overcome these limitations, the MAPTree algorithm leverages the posterior distribution over tree structures introduced by BCART. It is uniquely equipped to identify the provably maximum a posteriori tree from this distribution in an unconstrained setting.

To clarify, MAPTree’s main objectives are twofold: upon completion, it identifies the maximum a posteriori tree within the BCART posterior, while upon early termination, it returns the solution with the lowest cost within the explored explicit graph.

In their empirical study, the research team meticulously evaluates the efficiency of MAPTree in comparison to Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) baselines. Impressively, MAPTree outperforms both SMC and MCMC, consistently identifying trees with higher log posterior values at a faster pace than the baseline algorithms.

Additionally, the team assesses the generalization accuracy, log likelihood, and tree size of models produced by MAPTree and the baseline algorithms across a comprehensive set of 16 datasets from the CP4IM dataset. In all cases, MAPTree either excels in test accuracy or log likelihood compared to the baselines or, in cases of similar performance, produces notably leaner decision trees.

In summary, MAPTree represents a significant leap forward in the realm of decision tree modeling, offering a faster, more efficient, and superior alternative to existing approaches. Its potential impact on machine learning and data analysis cannot be overstated, promising practitioners a powerful tool for constructing decision trees that excel in both performance and economy.

The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/ThrunGroup/maptree. The paper MAPTree: Beating “Optimal” Decision Trees with Bayesian Decision Trees on arXiv.

---

Author: Hecate He | Editor: Chain Zhang

---

We know you don’t want to miss any news or research breakthroughs. Subscribe to our popular newsletter Synced Global AI Weekly to get weekly AI updates.