arXiv:2506.14143cs.LG2025-06ICML被引 6

提出新方法解决决策树预测等价问题,提升可解释性与鲁棒性。

Leveraging Predictive Equivalence in Decision Trees

  • 用布尔逻辑重构决策树,消除预测等价现象
  • 发现决策树对测试时缺失特征值具有强鲁棒性
  • 适用于变量重要性分析与预测成本优化

决策树因结构清晰被广泛用于可解释机器学习,但存在我们称之为预测等价的问题:同一决策边界可由多个不同结构的决策树表示。这些模型虽预测一致,但在变量重要性评估和缺失值处理上表现迥异,而现有优化方法会随机选择其一,导致结果不可靠。本文提出一种不具预测等价性的布尔逻辑表示,忠实反映原始决策边界。基于此表示,我们验证了决策树在测试时特征缺失情况下的惊人鲁棒性;揭示了预测等价对变量重要性量化的影响;并提出算法以优化达到预测的代价。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Decision trees are widely used for interpretable machine learning due to their clearly structured reasoning process. However, this structure belies a challenge we refer to as predictive equivalence: a given tree's decision boundary can be represented by many different decision trees. The presence of models with identical decision boundaries but different evaluation processes makes model selection challenging. The models will have different variable importance and behave differently in the presence of missing values, but most optimization procedures will arbitrarily choose one such model to return. We present a boolean logical representation of decision trees that does not exhibit predictive equivalence and is faithful to the underlying decision boundary. We apply our representation to several downstream machine learning tasks. Using our representation, we show that decision trees are surprisingly robust to test-time missingness of feature values; we address predictive equivalence's impact on quantifying variable importance; and we present an algorithm to optimize the cost of reaching predictions.

决策树可解释性缺失值逻辑表示

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