• Corpus ID: 246473164

# Hierarchical Shrinkage: improving the accuracy and interpretability of tree-based methods

@article{Agarwal2022HierarchicalSI,
title={Hierarchical Shrinkage: improving the accuracy and interpretability of tree-based methods},
author={Abhineet Agarwal and Yan Shuo Tan and Omer Ronen and Chandan Singh and Bin Yu},
journal={ArXiv},
year={2022},
volume={abs/2202.00858}
}
• Published 2 February 2022
• Computer Science
• ArXiv
Tree-based models such as decision trees and random forests (RF) are a cornerstone of modern machine-learning practice. To mitigate overfitting, trees are typically regularized by a variety of techniques that modify their structure (e.g. pruning). We introduce Hierarchical Shrinkage (HS), a post-hoc algorithm that does not modify the tree structure, and instead regularizes the tree by shrinking the prediction over each node towards the sample means of its ancestors. The amount of shrinkage is…
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