Towards Better Decision Forests: Forest Alternating Optimization

Decision forests are among the most accurate models in machine learning. This is remarkable given that the way they are trained is highly heuristic: neither the individual trees nor the overall forest optimize any well-defined loss. While diversity mechanisms such as bagging or boosting have been until now critical in the success of forests, we think that a better optimization should lead to better forests---ideally eliminating any need for an ensembling heuristic. However, unlike for most other models, such as neural networks, optimizing forests or trees is not easy, because they define a non-differentiable function. We show, for the first time, that it is possible to learn a forest by optimizing a desirable loss and regularization jointly over all its trees and parameters. Our algorithm, Forest Alternating Optimization, is based on defining a forest as a parametric model with a fixed number of trees and structure (rather than adding trees indefinitely as in bagging or boosting). It then iteratively updates each tree in alternation so that the objective function decreases monotonically. The algorithm is so effective at optimizing that it easily overfits, but this can be corrected by averaging. The result is a forest that consistently exceeds the accuracy of the state-of-the-art while using fewer, smaller trees.