Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) are popular machine learning algorithms with implementations such as LightGBM and in popular machine learning toolkits like Scikit-Learn. Many implementations can only produce trees in an offline manner and in a greedy manner. We explore ways to convert existing GBDT implementations to known neural network architectures with minimal performance loss in order to allow decision splits to be updated in an online manner and provide extensions to allow splits points to be altered as a neural architecture search problem. We provide learning bounds for our neural network.
Deep Neural Decision Forests @cite_7 demonstrates how neural decision tree forests can replace a fully connected layer using stochastic and differential decision trees which assume the node split structure fixed and the node split is learned.
@cite_7
2220384803
We present Deep Neural Decision Forests - a novel approach that unifies classification trees with the representation learning functionality known from deep convolutional networks, by training them in an end-to-end manner. To combine these two worlds, we introduce a stochastic and differentiable decision tree model, which steers the representation learning usually conducted in the initial layers of a (deep) convolutional network. Our model differs from conventional deep networks because a decision forest provides the final predictions and it differs from conventional decision forests since we propose a principled, joint and global optimization of split and leaf node parameters. We show experimental results on benchmark machine learning datasets like MNIST and ImageNet and find on-par or superior results when compared to state-of-the-art deep models. Most remarkably, we obtain Top5-Errors of only 7.84 6.38 on ImageNet validation data when integrating our forests in a single-crop, single seven model GoogLeNet architecture, respectively. Thus, even without any form of training data set augmentation we are improving on the 6.67 error obtained by the best GoogLeNet architecture (7 models, 144 crops).