Statistical Models Commons^™

Neural Shrubs: Using Neural Networks To Improve Decision Trees, Kyle Caudle, Randy Hoover, Aaron Alphonsus

SDSU Data Science Symposium

Decision trees are a method commonly used in machine learning to either predict a categorical response or a continuous response variable. Once the tree partitions the space, the response is either determined by the majority vote – classification trees, or by averaging the response values – regression trees. This research builds a standard regression tree and then instead of averaging the responses, we train a neural network to determine the response value. We have found that our approach typically increases the predicative capability of the decision tree. We have 2 demonstrations of this approach that we wish to present as …