An Algorithm for Reducing the Number of Distinct Branching Conditions in a Decision Forest

Abstract

Given a decision forest, we study a problem of reducing the number of its distinct branching conditions without changing each tree’s structure while keeping classification performance. A decision forest with a smaller number of distinct branching conditions can not only have a smaller description length but also be implemented by hardware more efficiently. To force the modified decision forest to keep classification performance, we consider a condition that the decision paths at each branching node do not change for 100σ% of the given feature vectors passing through the node for a given 0≤σ<1. Under this condition, we propose an algorithm that minimizes the number of distinct branching conditions by sharing the same condition among multiple branching nodes. According to our experimental results using 13 datasets in UCI machine learning repository, our algorithm succeeded more than 90% reduction on the number of distinct branching conditions for random forests learned from 3 datasets without degrading classification performance. 90% condition reduction was also observed for 7 other datasets within 0.17 degradation of prediction accuracy from the original prediction accuracy at least 0.673.