An Explainable Bayesian Decision Tree Algorithm

Abstract

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Bayesian Decision Trees provide a probabilistic framework that reduces the instability of Decision Trees while maintaining their explainability. While Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are typically used to construct Bayesian Decision Trees, here we provide a deterministic Bayesian Decision Tree algorithm that eliminates the sampling and does not require a pruning step. This algorithm generates the greedy-modal tree (GMT) which is applicable to both regression and classification problems. We tested the algorithm on various benchmark classification data sets and obtained similar accuracies to other known techniques. Furthermore, we show that we can statistically analyze how was the GMT derived from the data and demonstrate this analysis with a financial example. Notably, the GMT allows for a technique that provides explainable simpler models which is often a prerequisite for applications in finance or the medical industry.

Keywords

• explainable machine learning
• Bayesian statistics
• greedy algorithms
• Bayesian decision trees
• white box