用多阶段树结构在保持高准确率的同时,让多数样本仅通过少量可解释树推理。
Multistage Defer Trees for Hybrid Interpretability: If at First You Can't Succeed, Tree Again

- 分阶段设计稀疏决策树序列,每棵处理大部分数据,少量样本转给下一级或黑盒模型。
- 在多个数据集上达到复杂集成模型的准确率,90%以上样本仅经1-2棵树处理。
- 适合需要高准确率但又希望多数预测可解释的应用场景,如医疗、金融风控。
近期研究显示,优化良好的单个决策树在噪声数据中可媲美复杂黑盒模型。但在其他场景下,高精度仍需依赖复杂的树集成,牺牲可解释性。理想情况是:尽可能用一个或少数几棵简单树完成分类,实现多数样本的可解释性同时保持顶尖准确率。本文提出多阶段延迟树(Multistage Defer Trees):一系列稀疏决策树,每棵对大部分样本进行预测,仅将小部分样本传递至下一棵树或最终黑盒模型。实验表明,该方法可匹配复杂树集成的性能,且超过90%的样本仅通过1-2棵稀疏树处理。我们探讨了多种训练策略以维持模型简洁性。本方法在单棵树能力不足的场景下扩展了准确率-可解释性边界,证明即使使用复杂模型,也无需完全不可见。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent work has shown that well-optimized individual decision trees can match complex black box models in some settings, primarily in noisy domains. For the remaining settings, however, complex ensembled compositions of trees often achieve higher accuracy at the cost of interpretability, leaving practitioners with difficult modeling decisions along an accuracy-interpretability tradeoff. Ideally, we would like to classify as much of the data as possible with one or a small number of trees, achieving interpretability for most samples while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy. We introduce Multistage Defer Trees: a sequence of sparse decision trees that each make predictions for most samples, while deferring a small proportion to the next tree in the sequence or, ultimately, to a black box. We demonstrate that we can train this model class to match the performance of complex tree-based ensembles while routing most samples through only one or a small number of sparse decision trees. We discuss a range of techniques for training these models while maintaining simplicity. Our method expands the accuracy--interpretability frontier in settings where single-tree methods remain insufficient, demonstrating that even when complex models are necessary, they need not be fully opaque.
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