Learning Small Decision Trees with Few Outliers: A Parameterized Perspective

TL;DR

This paper investigates the parameterized complexity of constructing small decision trees with few outliers, establishing hardness results and fixed-parameter tractability under certain parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized decision tree learning problem considering outliers and provides complexity classifications, including W[1]-hardness and fixed-parameter tractability results.

Findings

DTSO and DTDO are W[1]-hard with respect to size and depth parameters plus feature differences.

Both problems are fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of outliers t.

The paper presents kernelization complexity results, showing both positive and negative outcomes.

Abstract

Decision trees are a fundamental tool in machine learning for representing, classifying, and generalizing data. It is desirable to construct ``small'' decision trees, by minimizing either the \textit{size} ($s$) or the \textit{depth} $(d)$ of the \textit{decision tree} (\textsc{DT}). Recently, the parameterized complexity of \textsc{Decision Tree Learning} has attracted a lot of attention. We consider a generalization of \textsc{Decision Tree Learning} where given a \textit{classification instance} $E$ and an integer $t$, the task is to find a ``small'' \textsc{DT} that disagrees with $E$ in at most $t$ examples. We consider two problems: \textsc{DTSO} and \textsc{DTDO}, where the goal is to construct a \textsc{DT} minimizing $s$ and $d$, respectively. We first establish that both \textsc{DTSO} and \textsc{DTDO} are W[1]-hard when parameterized by $s+\delta_{max}$ and $d+\delta_{max}$, respectively, where $\delta_{max}$ is the maximum number of features in which two differently labeled examples can differ. We complement this result by showing that these problems become \textsc{FPT} if we include the parameter $t$. We also consider the kernelization complexity of these problems and establish several positive and negative results for both \textsc{DTSO} and \textsc{DTDO}.