Learning Customised Decision Trees for Domain-knowledge Constraints
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When applied to critical domains, machine learning models usually need to comply with prior knowledge and domain-specific requirements. For example, one may require that a learned decision tree model should be of limited size and fair, so as to be easily interpretable, trusted, and adopted. However, most state-of-the-art models, even on decision trees , only aim to maximising expected accuracy. In this paper, we propose a framework in which a diverse family of prior and domain knowledge can be formalised and imposed as constraints on decision trees . This framework is built upon a newly introduced tree representation that leads to two generic linear programming formulations of the optimal decision tree problem. The first one targets binary features , while the second one handles continuous features without the need for discretisation . We theoretically show how a diverse family of constraints can be formalised in our framework. We validate the framework with constraints on several applications and perform extensive experiments, demonstrating empirical evidence of comparable performance w.r.t. state-of-the-art tree learners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".