arXiv:2608.06195stat.MLcs.LG2026-08被引 1

让概率回归树直接处理缺失数据,无需预填充。

Handling Missing Data in Probabilistic Regression Trees

论文配图:Handling Missing Data in Probabilistic Regression Trees
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出三种直接处理缺失值的策略,保持概率一致性。
  • 在多组真实数据上表现优于传统树模型,尤其缺失率高时。
  • 适合需要解释性又含缺失数据的建模任务。

概率回归树(PRTrees)是经典回归树的平滑且一致的替代方案,通过概率分割分配生成连续预测。本文将PRTree框架扩展至在树构建阶段直接处理缺失预测变量,无需事先插补。提出了三种策略:均匀概率法、部分观测法和降维平滑法,各自以不同方式利用可用信息。这些修改确保了原始方法的基本概率性质(如概率守恒与边缘相容性)在任意缺失模式下依然成立。在多个真实世界数据集上评估,这些方法表现出色,尤其当缺失比例较高时,性能显著优于经典决策树(CART)。结果表明,缺失值处理策略对预测效果影响极大,常超过平滑分布或代理选择标准的影响。所提方法在保持树模型可解释性与灵活性的同时,有效应对缺失数据挑战。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Probabilistic Regression Trees (PRTrees) are a smooth and consistent alternative to classical regression trees, producing continuous predictions through probabilistic split assignments. This paper extends the PRTree framework to accommodate missing predictor values directly during tree construction, eliminating the need for prior imputation. Three strategies are proposed, each exploiting the available information differently: a uniform-probability approach, a partial-observation approach, and a dimension-reduced smoothing approach. These modifications are defined to preserve the fundamental probabilistic properties of the original methodology, including probability conservation and marginal compatibility, under arbitrary patterns of missing covariate values. The proposed methods are evaluated on several real-world datasets exhibiting different levels of missingness and are compared with classical regression trees. The results show that the effectiveness of probabilistic tree construction depends strongly on the treatment of missing observations. Across the considered datasets, the fill strategy emerged as the dominant modeling component, often exerting a larger influence on predictive performance than either the smoothing distribution or the proxy-selection criterion. In datasets where a substantial proportion of observations contained missing predictor values, the proposed methods frequently outperformed CART, while maintaining the interpretability and flexibility of tree-based models.

缺失数据概率树回归建模

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