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Lecture

Decision Forests: Structure and Training

In course

CS-233(b): Introduction to machine learning (BA4)

Machine learning and data analysis are becoming increasingly central in many sciences and applications. In this course, fundamental principles and methods of machine learning will be introduced, analyzed and practically implemented. ...

Description

This lecture covers the fundamentals of decision forests, focusing on decision trees, training processes, weak learners, entropy, information gain, and the transition from trees to forests. It also discusses boosting, 3D pose estimation, body part recognition, and the practical applications of decision forests.

Instructor

Pascal Fua

Pascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Information engineering

Machine learning: Decision tree learning

Related concepts (32)

Gradient boosting

Gradient boosting is a machine learning technique used in regression and classification tasks, among others. It gives a prediction model in the form of an ensemble of weak prediction models, i.e., models that make very few assumptions about the data, which are typically simple decision trees. When a decision tree is the weak learner, the resulting algorithm is called gradient-boosted trees; it usually outperforms random forest.

Boosting (machine learning)

In machine learning, boosting is an ensemble meta-algorithm for primarily reducing bias, and also variance in supervised learning, and a family of machine learning algorithms that convert weak learners to strong ones. Boosting is based on the question posed by Kearns and Valiant (1988, 1989): "Can a set of weak learners create a single strong learner?" A weak learner is defined to be a classifier that is only slightly correlated with the true classification (it can label examples better than random guessing).

Decision tree

A decision tree is a decision support hierarchical model that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains conditional control statements. Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to help identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal, but are also a popular tool in machine learning.

Random forest

Random forests or random decision forests is an ensemble learning method for classification, regression and other tasks that operates by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time. For classification tasks, the output of the random forest is the class selected by most trees. For regression tasks, the mean or average prediction of the individual trees is returned. Random decision forests correct for decision trees' habit of overfitting to their training set.

Decision tree learning

Decision tree learning is a supervised learning approach used in statistics, data mining and machine learning. In this formalism, a classification or regression decision tree is used as a predictive model to draw conclusions about a set of observations. Tree models where the target variable can take a discrete set of values are called classification trees; in these tree structures, leaves represent class labels and branches represent conjunctions of features that lead to those class labels.

Related lectures (32)

Building a Decision Tree

Covers building decision trees to classify mushrooms as poisonous or not.

Decision Trees: Induction & Attributes

Explores decision trees, attribute selection, bias-variance tradeoff, and ensemble methods in machine learning.

Structured Classifications: Decision Trees and Boosting

Explores decision trees, overfitting elimination, boosting techniques, and their practical applications in predictive modeling.

Decision Trees: Overfitting and Randomization

Explores decision trees, overfitting, and randomization in supervised learning, emphasizing the importance of managing variance and feature selection.

Supervised Learning: Decision Trees