A new approach called ABRF (the attention-based random forest) and its modifications for applying the attention mechanism to the random forest (RF) for regression and classification are proposed. The main idea behind the proposed ABRF models is to assign attention weights with trainable parameters to decision trees in a specific way. The weights depend on the distance between an instance, which falls into a corresponding leaf of a tree, and instances, which fall in the same leaf. This idea stems from representation of the Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression in the form of a RF. Three modifications of the general approach are proposed. The first one is based on applying the Huber's contamination model and on computing the attention weights by solving quadratic or linear optimization problems. The second and the third modifications use the gradient-based algorithms for computing trainable parameters. Numerical experiments with various regression and classification datasets illustrate the proposed method.
Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
New models of the attention-based random forests called LARF (Leaf Attention-based Random Forest) are proposed. The first idea behind the models is to introduce a two-level attention, where one of the levels is the "leaf" attention and the attention mechanism is applied to every leaf of trees. The second level is the tree attention depending on the "leaf" attention. The second idea is to replace the softmax operation in the attention with the weighted sum of the softmax operations with different parameters. It is implemented by applying a mixture of the Huber's contamination models and can be …
Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
New models of random forests jointly using the attention and self-attention mechanisms are proposed for solving the regression problem. The models can be regarded as extensions of the attention-based random forest whose idea stems from applying a combination of the Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression and the Huber's contamination model to random forests. The self-attention aims to capture dependencies of the tree predictions and to remove noise or anomalous predictions in the random forest. The self-attention module is trained jointly with the attention module for computing weights. It is shown …
Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University（厦门大学电子科学系）
We present a general architecture of deep differentiable forest and its sparse attention mechanism. The differentiable forest has the advantages of both trees and neural networks. Its structure is a simple binary tree, easy to use and understand. It has full differentiability and all variables are learnable parameters. We would train it by the gradient-based optimization method, which shows great power in the training of deep CNN. We find and analyze the attention mechanism in the differentiable forest. That is, each decision depends on only a few important features, and others are irrelevant.…
The present study provides a comparative assessment of non-invasive sensors as means of estimating the microbial contamination and time-on-shelf (i.e. storage time) of leafy green vegetables, using a novel unified spectra analysis workflow. Two fresh ready-to-eat green salads were used in the context of this study for the purpose of evaluating the efficiency and practical application of the presented workflow: rocket and baby spinach salads. The employed analysis workflow consisted of robust data normalization, powerful feature selection based on random forests regression, and selection of the…
Due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications, many of which are coming with safety requirements, the notion of uncertainty has received increasing attention in machine learning research in the last couple of years. In particular, the idea of distinguishing between two important types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic, has recently been studied in the setting of supervised learning. In this paper, we propose to quantify these uncertainties with random forests. More specifically, we show how two general approaches for measurin…
Turing machine and decision tree have developed independently for a long time. With the recent development of differentiable models, there is an intersection between them. Neural turing machine(NTM) opens door for the memory network. It use differentiable attention mechanism to read/write external memory bank. Differentiable forest brings differentiable properties to classical decision tree. In this short note, we show the deep connection between these two models. That is: differentiable forest is a special case of NTM. Differentiable forest is actually decision tree based neural turing machin…
Booz Allen Hamilton, Strategic Innovation Group（博思艾伦咨询公司战略创新集团）；University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
The potential lack of fairness in the outputs of machine learning algorithms has recently gained attention both within the research community as well as in society more broadly. Surprisingly, there is no prior work developing tree-induction algorithms for building fair decision trees or fair random forests. These methods have widespread popularity as they are one of the few to be simultaneously interpretable, non-linear, and easy-to-use. In this paper we develop, to our knowledge, the first technique for the induction of fair decision trees. We show that our "Fair Forest" retains the benefits …
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Capital One（第一资本金融公司）
Tabular data underpins numerous high-impact applications of machine learning from fraud detection to genomics and healthcare. Classical approaches to solving tabular problems, such as gradient boosting and random forests, are widely used by practitioners. However, recent deep learning methods have achieved a degree of performance competitive with popular techniques. We devise a hybrid deep learning approach to solving tabular data problems. Our method, SAINT, performs attention over both rows and columns, and it includes an enhanced embedding method. We also study a new contrastive self-superv…
Fromthesky Research Labs LLC（Fromthesky研究实验室有限责任公司）
We present an attention mechanism inspired from definition of screened Coulomb potential. This attention mechanism was used to interpret the Graph Attention (GAT) model layers and training dataset by using a flexible and scalable framework (CoulGAT) developed for this purpose. Using CoulGAT, a forest of plain and resnet models were trained and characterized using this attention mechanism against CHAMPS dataset. The learnable variables of the attention mechanism are used to extract node-node and node-feature interactions to define an empirical standard model for the graph structure and hidden l…
The random forest algorithm, proposed by L. Breiman in 2001, has been extremely successful as a general-purpose classification and regression method. The approach, which combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their predictions by averaging, has shown excellent performance in settings where the number of variables is much larger than the number of observations. Moreover, it is versatile enough to be applied to large-scale problems, is easily adapted to various ad-hoc learning tasks, and returns measures of variable importance. The present article reviews the most recent theor…
The issue of estimating residual variance in regression models has experienced relatively little attention in the machine learning community. However, the estimate is of primary interest in many practical applications, e.g. as a primary step towards the construction of prediction intervals. Here, we consider this issue for the random forest. Therein, the functional relationship between covariates and response variable is modeled by a weighted sum of the latter. The dependence structure is, however, involved in the weights that are constructed during the tree construction process making the mod…
Phase-Preserving Trimodal Transformer for Tropical Forest Biomass Estimation Using Optical and PolInSAR Data
Institute of Computing (IComp), Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM)（亚马逊联邦大学计算研究所）；Brazilian Army Research Institute in the Amazon (IPEAM)（巴西陆军亚马逊研究所）；Military Institute of Engineering (IME)（军事工程学院）
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Izmir Katip Celebi University（伊兹密尔卡蒂普·切莱比大学）；Qingdao University（青岛大学）
Acoustic scene classification (ASC) aims to classify an audio clip based on the characteristic of the recording environment. In this regard, deep learning based approaches have emerged as a useful tool for ASC problems. Conventional approaches to improving the classification accuracy include integrating auxiliary methods such as attention mechanism, pre-trained models and ensemble multiple sub-networks. However, due to the complexity of audio clips captured from different environments, it is difficult to distinguish their categories without using any auxiliary methods for existing deep learnin…
Interpolation-Driven Machine Learning Approaches for Plume Shine Dose Estimation: A Comparison of XGBoost, Random Forest, and TabNet
Health Physics Division, Health Safety \& Environment Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Mumbai – 400085, India；Birla Institute of Technology And Science, Pilani, Rajasthan – 333031, India；Environment Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Mumbai – 400085, India
University Hospital of Zurich（苏黎世大学医院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Yale University School of Medicine（耶鲁大学医学院）
Patients increasingly turn to search engines and online content before, or in place of, talking with a health professional. Low quality health information, which is common on the internet, presents risks to the patient in the form of misinformation and a possibly poorer relationship with their physician. To address this, the DISCERN criteria (developed at University of Oxford) are used to evaluate the quality of online health information. However, patients are unlikely to take the time to apply these criteria to the health websites they visit. We built an automated implementation of the DISCER…
Jožef Stefan Institute（约泽夫·斯蒂芬研究所）；International Postgraduate School Jožef Stefan（约泽夫·斯蒂芬国际研究生院）
Black-box neural network models are widely used in industry and science, yet are hard to understand and interpret. Recently, the attention mechanism was introduced, offering insights into the inner workings of neural language models. This paper explores the use of attention-based neural networks mechanism for estimating feature importance, as means for explaining the models learned from propositional (tabular) data. Feature importance estimates, assessed by the proposed Self-Attention Network (SAN) architecture, are compared with the established ReliefF, Mutual Information and Random Forest-ba…
Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
A new modification of Isolation Forest called Attention-Based Isolation Forest (ABIForest) for solving the anomaly detection problem is proposed. It incorporates the attention mechanism in the form of the Nadaraya-Watson regression into the Isolation Forest for improving solution of the anomaly detection problem. The main idea underlying the modification is to assign attention weights to each path of trees with learnable parameters depending on instances and trees themselves. The Huber's contamination model is proposed to be used for defining the attention weights and their parameters. As a re…
Scattered trees outside of dense, closed-canopy forests are very important for carbon sequestration, supporting livelihoods, maintaining ecosystem integrity, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. In contrast to trees inside of closed-canopy forests, not much is known about the spatial extent and distribution of scattered trees at a global scale. Due to the cost of high-resolution satellite imagery, global monitoring systems rely on medium-resolution satellites to monitor land use. Here we present a globally consistent method to identify trees with canopy diameters greater than three me…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Department of Electronic Science（电子科学系）
Differentiable forest is an ensemble of decision trees with full differentiability. Its simple tree structure is easy to use and explain. With full differentiability, it would be trained in the end-to-end learning framework with gradient-based optimization method. In this paper, we propose tree attention block(TAB) in the framework of differentiable forest. TAB block has two operations, squeeze and regulate. The squeeze operation would extract the characteristic of each tree. The regulate operation would learn nonlinear relations between these trees. So TAB block would learn the importance of …
Pilot Contamination-Aware Graph Attention Network for Power Control in CFmMIMO
Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Aalto University（艾尔沃斯大学信息与通信工程系）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学电气与计算机工程学院）；School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学电气、计算机与能源工程学院）；Center for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu（奥卢大学无线通信中心）
AMA University（AMA大学）；Bulacan State University（布拉卡国立大学）；Asian Institute of Computer Studies（亚洲计算机学院）；New Era University（新时代大学）；University of the East（东方大学）
This study aims to predict the pollution level that threatens the Marilao River, located in the province of Bulacan, Philippines. The inhabitants of this area are now being exposed to pollution. Contamination of this waterway comes from both formal and informal industries, such as a used lead-acid battery, open dumpsites metal refining, and other toxic metals. Using various water quality parameters like Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Potential of Hydrogen (pH), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSS) were the basis for predicting the pollution level. This study used the Data M…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Artificial intelligence has deeply revolutionized the field of medicinal chemistry with many impressive applications, but the success of these applications requires a massive amount of training samples with high-quality annotations, which seriously limits the wide usage of data-driven methods. In this paper, we focus on the reaction yield prediction problem, which assists chemists in selecting high-yield reactions in a new chemical space only with a few experimental trials. To attack this challenge, we first put forth MetaRF, an attention-based differentiable random forest model specially desi…
University of Kerala（喀拉拉大学）；College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram（特里凡得琅工程学院）
Wind speed forecasting models and their application to wind farm operations are attaining remarkable attention in the literature because of its benefits as a clean energy source. In this paper, we suggested the time series machine learning approach called random forest regression for predicting wind speed variations. The computed values of mutual information and auto-correlation shows that wind speed values depend on the past data up to 12 hours. The random forest model was trained using ensemble from two weeks data with previous 12 hours values as input for every value. The computed root mean…
Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
A new attention-based model for the gradient boosting machine (GBM) called AGBoost (the attention-based gradient boosting) is proposed for solving regression problems. The main idea behind the proposed AGBoost model is to assign attention weights with trainable parameters to iterations of GBM under condition that decision trees are base learners in GBM. Attention weights are determined by applying properties of decision trees and by using the Huber's contamination model which provides an interesting linear dependence between trainable parameters of the attention and the attention weights. This…
Paderborn University（帕德博恩大学）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
It is well known that different algorithms perform differently well on an instance of an algorithmic problem, motivating algorithm selection (AS): Given an instance of an algorithmic problem, which is the most suitable algorithm to solve it? As such, the AS problem has received considerable attention resulting in various approaches - many of which either solve a regression or ranking problem under the hood. Although both of these formulations yield very natural ways to tackle AS, they have considerable weaknesses. On the one hand, correctly predicting the performance of an algorithm on an inst…
Trained Random Forests Completely Reveal your Dataset
CIRRELT；SCALE-AI Chair in Data-Driven Supply Chains（SCALE-AI数据驱动供应链讲席）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées（巴黎路桥学院）
