Reinforcement Learning Trees

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhu, Ruoqing; Zeng, Donglin; Kosorok, Michael R.
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2015.1036994
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1770-1784
• 关键词: random forests; randomized trees; CLASSIFICATION; selection; Consistency; Lasso; MODEL

摘要

In this article, we introduce a new type of tree-based method, reinforcement learning trees (RLT), which exhibits significantly improved performance over traditional methods such as random forests (Breiman 2001) under high-dimensional settings. The innovations are threefold. First, the new method implements reinforcement learning at each selection of a splitting variable during the tree construction processes. By splitting on the variable that brings the greatest future improvement in later splits, rather than choosing the one with largest marginal effect from the immediate split, the constructed tree uses the available samples in a more efficient way. Moreover, such an approach enables linear combination cuts at little extra computational cost. Second, we propose a variable muting procedure that progressively eliminates noise variables during the construction of each individual tree. The muting procedure also takes advantage of reinforcement learning and prevents noise variables from being considered in the search for splitting rules, so that toward terminal nodes, where the sample size is small, the splitting rules are still constructed from only strong variables. Last, we investigate asymptotic properties of the proposed method under basic assumptions and discuss rationale in general settings. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.