{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/discovering-the-interpretability-performance","title":"Interpretable Decision Tree Search as a Markov Decision Process","arxiv_id":"2309.12701","date":"2023-09-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hector Kohler","Riad Akrour","Philippe Preux"],"abstract":"Finding an optimal decision tree for a supervised learning task is a challenging combinatorial problem to solve at scale. It was recently proposed to frame the problem as a Markov Decision Problem (MDP) and use deep reinforcement learning to tackle scaling. Unfortunately, these methods are not competitive with the current branch-and-bound state-of-the-art. We propose instead to scale the resolution of such MDPs using an information-theoretic tests generating function that heuristically, and dynamically for every state, limits the set of admissible test actions to a few good candidates. As a solver, we show empirically that our algorithm is at the very least competitive with branch-and-bound alternatives. As a machine learning tool, a key advantage of our approach is to solve for multiple complexity-performance trade-offs at virtually no additional cost. With such a set of solutions, a user can then select the tree that generalizes best and which has the interpretability level that best suits their needs, which no current branch-and-bound method allows.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12701v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12701v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"discovering-the-interpretability-performance","repo_url":"https://github.com/KohlerHECTOR/DPDTreeEstimator","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2309.12701","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}