7 accepted papers
We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best a…
We design an algorithm for finding counterfactuals with strong theoretical guarantees on its performance. For any monotone model $f : X^d \to \{0,1\}$ and instance $x^\star$, our algorithm makes \[{S}(f)^{O(\Delta_f(x^\star))}\cdot \log d\]{queries} to $f$ and returns an {\sl optimal} counterfactual…
Using the framework of boosting, we prove that all impurity-based decision tree learning algorithms, including the classic ID3, C4.5, and CART, are highly noise tolerant. Our guarantees hold under the strongest noise model of nasty noise, and we provide near-matching upper and lower bounds on the al…
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of an arbitrary blackbox model $f$: given query access to $f$ and an instance $x$, output a small set of $x$'s features that in conjunction essentially determines $f(x)$. We design an efficient algorithm with provable guarantees on the succinctne…
We show that top-down decision tree learning heuristics (such as ID3, C4.5, and CART) are amenable to highly efficient {\sl learnability estimation}: for monotone target functions, the error of the decision tree hypothesis constructed by these heuristics can be estimated with {\sl polylogarithmical…
We give strengthened provable guarantees on the performance of widely employed and empirically successful {\sl top-down decision tree learning heuristics}. While prior works have focused on the realizable setting, we consider the more realistic and challenging {\sl agnostic} setting. We show that fo…
We propose a simple extension of {\sl top-down decision tree learning heuristics} such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. Our algorithm achieves provable guarantees for all target functions $f: \{-1,1\}^n \to \{-1,1\}$ with respect to the uniform distribution, circumventing impossibility results showing that…