A review of tree-based Bayesian methods

Abstract

Tree-based regression and classification ensembles form a standard part of the data-science toolkit. Many commonly used methods take an algorithmic view, proposing greedy methods for constructing decision trees; examples include the classification and regression trees algorithm, boosted decision trees, and random forests. Recent history has seen a surge of interest in Bayesian techniques for constructing decision tree ensembles, with these methods frequently outperforming their algorithmic counterparts. The goal of this article is to survey the landscape surrounding Bayesian decision tree methods, and to discuss recent modeling and computational developments. We provide connections between Bayesian tree-based methods and existing machine learning techniques, and outline several recent theoretical developments establishing frequentist consistency and rates of convergence for the posterior distribution. The methodology we present is applicable for a wide variety of statistical tasks including regression, classification, modeling of count data, and many others. We illustrate the methodology on both simulated and real datasets.