Online Learning of Decision Trees with Thompson Sampling
Ayman Chaouki Jesse Read Albert Bifet
Decision Trees are prominent prediction models for interpretable Machine
Learning. They have been thoroughly researched, mostly in the batch setting
with a fixed labelled dataset, leading to popular algorithms such as C4.5, ID3
and CART. Unfortunately, these methods are of heuristic nature, they rely on
greedy splits offering no guarantees of global optimality and often leading to
unnecessarily complex and hard-to-interpret Decision Trees. Recent
breakthroughs addressed this suboptimality issue in the batch setting, but no
such work has considered the online setting with data arriving in a stream. To
this end, we devise a new Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm, Thompson Sampling
Decision Trees (TSDT), able to produce optimal Decision Trees in an online
setting. We analyse our algorithm and prove its almost sure convergence to the
optimal tree. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to validate our
findings empirically. The proposed TSDT outperforms existing algorithms on
several benchmarks, all while presenting the practical advantage of being
tailored to the online setting.