Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition

An ensemble of decision trees

Decision trees are widely used models for classification and regression tasks, much like a binary tree, where each node represents a question leading to a yes-no answer for traversing the respective left and right nodes. The goal is to get to the right answer by asking as few questions as possible.

A paper describing deep neural decision trees can be found at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.06988.pdf.

Traversing deep down decision trees can quickly lead to overfitting of the given data, rather than inferring the overall properties of the distributions from which they are drawn. To address this issue of overfitting, the data can be split into subsets and train on different trees, each on a subset. This way, we end ...