{"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/learning-decision-trees-with-gradient-descent","title":"GradTree: Learning Axis-Aligned Decision Trees with Gradient Descent","arxiv_id":"2305.03515","date":"2023-05-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sascha Marton","Stefan Lüdtke","Christian Bartelt","Heiner Stuckenschmidt"],"abstract":"Decision Trees (DTs) are commonly used for many machine learning tasks due to their high degree of interpretability. However, learning a DT from data is a difficult optimization problem, as it is non-convex and non-differentiable. Therefore, common approaches learn DTs using a greedy growth algorithm that minimizes the impurity locally at each internal node. Unfortunately, this greedy procedure can lead to inaccurate trees. In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned DTs with gradient descent. The proposed method uses backpropagation with a straight-through operator on a dense DT representation, to jointly optimize all tree parameters. Our approach outperforms existing methods on binary classification benchmarks and achieves competitive results for multi-class tasks. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GradTree","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.03515v7","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.03515v7.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":"learning-decision-trees-with-gradient-descent","repo_url":"https://github.com/s-marton/gradtree","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binary-classification","task_name":"Binary Classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.03515","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}