Tree Ensembles on the Induced Discrete Space

Decision trees are widely used predictive models in machine learning. Recently, K-tree is proposed, where the original discrete feature space is expanded by generating all orderings of values of k discrete attributes and these orderings are used as the new attributes in decision tree induction. Although K-tree performs significantly better than the proper one, their exponential time complexity can prohibit their use. In this brief, we propose K-forest, an extension of random forest, where a subset of features is selected randomly from the induced discrete space. Simulation results on 17 data sets show that the novel ensemble classifier has significantly lower error rate compared with the random forest based on the original feature space.