Harnessing the Power of Choices in Decision Tree Learning

We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best attribute. Our algorithm, Top-$k$, considers the $k$ best attributes as possible splits instead of just the single best attribute. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, the power of this simple generalization. We first prove a {\sl greediness hierarchy theorem} showing that for every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, Top-$(k+1)$ can be dramatically more powerful than Top-$k$: there are data distributions for which the former achieves accuracy $1-\varepsilon$, whereas the latter only achieves accuracy $\frac1{2}+\varepsilon$. We then show, through extensive experiments, that Top-$k$ outperforms the two main approaches to decision tree learning: classic greedy algorithms and more recent "optimal decision tree" algorithms. On one hand, Top-$k$ consistently enjoys significant accuracy gains over greedy algorithms across a wide range of benchmarks. On the other hand, Top-$k$ is markedly more scalable than optimal decision tree algorithms and is able to handle dataset and feature set sizes that remain far beyond the reach of these algorithms.

Lifting uniform learners via distributional decomposition

We show how any PAC learning algorithm that works under the uniform distribution can be transformed, in a blackbox fashion, into one that works under an arbitrary and unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. The efficiency of our transformation scales with the inherent complexity of $\mathcal{D}$, running in $\mathrm{poly}(n, (md)^d)$ time for distributions over $\{\pm 1\}^n$ whose pmfs are computed by depth-$d$ decision trees, where $m$ is the sample complexity of the original algorithm. For monotone distributions our transformation uses only samples from $\mathcal{D}$, and for general ones it uses subcube conditioning samples. A key technical ingredient is an algorithm which, given the aforementioned access to $\mathcal{D}$, produces an optimal decision tree decomposition of $\mathcal{D}$: an approximation of $\mathcal{D}$ as a mixture of uniform distributions over disjoint subcubes. With this decomposition in hand, we run the uniform-distribution learner on each subcube and combine the hypotheses using the decision tree. This algorithmic decomposition lemma also yields new algorithms for learning decision tree distributions with runtimes that exponentially improve on the prior state of the art -- results of independent interest in distribution learning.

Subsampling Suffices for Adaptive Data Analysis

Ensuring that analyses performed on a dataset are representative of the entire population is one of the central problems in statistics. Most classical techniques assume that the dataset is independent of the analyst's query and break down in the common setting where a dataset is reused for multiple, adaptively chosen, queries. This problem of \emph{adaptive data analysis} was formalized in the seminal works of Dwork et al. (STOC, 2015) and Hardt and Ullman (FOCS, 2014). We identify a remarkably simple set of assumptions under which the queries will continue to be representative even when chosen adaptively: The only requirements are that each query takes as input a random subsample and outputs few bits. This result shows that the noise inherent in subsampling is sufficient to guarantee that query responses generalize. The simplicity of this subsampling-based framework allows it to model a variety of real-world scenarios not covered by prior work. In addition to its simplicity, we demonstrate the utility of this framework by designing mechanisms for two foundational tasks, statistical queries and median finding. In particular, our mechanism for answering the broadly applicable class of statistical queries is both extremely simple and state of the art in many parameter regimes.

Multitask Learning via Shared Features: Algorithms and Hardness

We investigate the computational efficiency of multitask learning of Boolean functions over the $d$-dimensional hypercube, that are related by means of a feature representation of size $k \ll d$ shared across all tasks. We present a polynomial time multitask learning algorithm for the concept class of halfspaces with margin $\gamma$, which is based on a simultaneous boosting technique and requires only $\textrm{poly}(k/\gamma)$ samples-per-task and $\textrm{poly}(k\log(d)/\gamma)$ samples in total. In addition, we prove a computational separation, showing that assuming there exists a concept class that cannot be learned in the attribute-efficient model, we can construct another concept class such that can be learned in the attribute-efficient model, but cannot be multitask learned efficiently -- multitask learning this concept class either requires super-polynomial time complexity or a much larger total number of samples.

A Query-Optimal Algorithm for Finding Counterfactuals

We design an algorithm for finding counterfactuals with strong theoretical guarantees on its performance. For any monotone model $f : X^d \to \{0,1\}$ and instance $x^\star$, our algorithm makes \[ {S(f)^{O(\Delta_f(x^\star))}\cdot \log d}\] queries to $f$ and returns {an {\sl optimal}} counterfactual for $x^\star$: a nearest instance $x'$ to $x^\star$ for which $f(x')\ne f(x^\star)$. Here $S(f)$ is the sensitivity of $f$, a discrete analogue of the Lipschitz constant, and $\Delta_f(x^\star)$ is the distance from $x^\star$ to its nearest counterfactuals. The previous best known query complexity was $d^{\,O(\Delta_f(x^\star))}$, achievable by brute-force local search. We further prove a lower bound of $S(f)^{\Omega(\Delta_f(x^\star))} + \Omega(\log d)$ on the query complexity of any algorithm, thereby showing that the guarantees of our algorithm are essentially optimal.

Open Problem: Properly learning decision trees in polynomial time?

The authors recently gave an $n^{O(\log\log n)}$ time membership query algorithm for properly learning decision trees under the uniform distribution (Blanc et al., 2021). The previous fastest algorithm for this problem ran in $n^{O(\log n)}$ time, a consequence of Ehrenfeucht and Haussler (1989)'s classic algorithm for the distribution-free setting. In this article we highlight the natural open problem of obtaining a polynomial-time algorithm, discuss possible avenues towards obtaining it, and state intermediate milestones that we believe are of independent interest.

Popular decision tree algorithms are provably noise tolerant

Using the framework of boosting, we prove that all impurity-based decision tree learning algorithms, including the classic ID3, C4.5, and CART, are highly noise tolerant. Our guarantees hold under the strongest noise model of nasty noise, and we provide near-matching upper and lower bounds on the allowable noise rate. We further show that these algorithms, which are simple and have long been central to everyday machine learning, enjoy provable guarantees in the noisy setting that are unmatched by existing algorithms in the theoretical literature on decision tree learning. Taken together, our results add to an ongoing line of research that seeks to place the empirical success of these practical decision tree algorithms on firm theoretical footing.

On the power of adaptivity in statistical adversaries

We study a fundamental question concerning adversarial noise models in statistical problems where the algorithm receives i.i.d. draws from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$. The definitions of these adversaries specify the type of allowable corruptions (noise model) as well as when these corruptions can be made (adaptivity); the latter differentiates between oblivious adversaries that can only corrupt the distribution $\mathcal{D}$ and adaptive adversaries that can have their corruptions depend on the specific sample $S$ that is drawn from $\mathcal{D}$. In this work, we investigate whether oblivious adversaries are effectively equivalent to adaptive adversaries, across all noise models studied in the literature. Specifically, can the behavior of an algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ in the presence of oblivious adversaries always be well-approximated by that of an algorithm $\mathcal{A}'$ in the presence of adaptive adversaries? Our first result shows that this is indeed the case for the broad class of statistical query algorithms, under all reasonable noise models. We then show that in the specific case of additive noise, this equivalence holds for all algorithms. Finally, we map out an approach towards proving this statement in its fullest generality, for all algorithms and under all reasonable noise models.

Provably efficient, succinct, and precise explanations

We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of an arbitrary blackbox model $f$: given query access to $f$ and an instance $x$, output a small set of $x$'s features that in conjunction essentially determines $f(x)$. We design an efficient algorithm with provable guarantees on the succinctness and precision of the explanations that it returns. Prior algorithms were either efficient but lacked such guarantees, or achieved such guarantees but were inefficient. We obtain our algorithm via a connection to the problem of {\sl implicitly} learning decision trees. The implicit nature of this learning task allows for efficient algorithms even when the complexity of $f$ necessitates an intractably large surrogate decision tree. We solve the implicit learning problem by bringing together techniques from learning theory, local computation algorithms, and complexity theory. Our approach of "explaining by implicit learning" shares elements of two previously disparate methods for post-hoc explanations, global and local explanations, and we make the case that it enjoys advantages of both.

Properly learning decision trees in almost polynomial time

We give an $n^{O(\log\log n)}$-time membership query algorithm for properly and agnostically learning decision trees under the uniform distribution over $\{\pm 1\}^n$. Even in the realizable setting, the previous fastest runtime was $n^{O(\log n)}$, a consequence of a classic algorithm of Ehrenfeucht and Haussler. Our algorithm shares similarities with practical heuristics for learning decision trees, which we augment with additional ideas to circumvent known lower bounds against these heuristics. To analyze our algorithm, we prove a new structural result for decision trees that strengthens a theorem of O'Donnell, Saks, Schramm, and Servedio. While the OSSS theorem says that every decision tree has an influential variable, we show how every decision tree can be "pruned" so that every variable in the resulting tree is influential.