SAT-Based Encodings for Optimal Decision Trees with Explicit Paths

Abstract

Decision trees play an important role both in Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation. They are attractive due to their immediate interpretability. In the spirit of Occam’s razor, and interpretability, it is desirable to calculate the smallest tree. This, however, has proven to be a challenging task and greedy approaches are typically used to learn trees in practice. Nevertheless, recent work showed that by the use of SAT solvers one may calculate the optimal size tree for real-world benchmarks. This paper proposes a novel SAT-based encoding that explicitly models paths in the tree, which enables us to control the tree’s depth as well as size. At the level of individual SAT calls, we investigate splitting the search space into tree topologies. Our tool outperforms the existing implementation. But also, the experimental results show that minimizing the depth first and then minimizing the number of nodes enables solving a larger set of instances.