Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) are popular machine learning
algorithms with implementations such as LightGBM and in popular machine
learning toolkits like Scikit-Learn. Many implementations can only produce
trees in an offline manner and in a greedy manner. We explore ways to convert
existing GBDT implementations to known neural network architectures with
minimal performance loss in order to allow decision splits to be updated in an
online manner and provide extensions to allow splits points to be altered as a
neural architecture search problem. We provide learning bounds for our neural
network.Comment: Technical Report on Implementation of Deep Neural Decision Forests
Algorithm. To accompany implementation here:
https://github.com/chappers/TreeGrad. Update: Please cite as: Siu, C. (2019).
"Transferring Tree Ensembles to Neural Networks". International Conference on
Neural Information Processing. Springer, 2019. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:1909.1179