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Adaptive Forests For Classification

Published: October 27, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.22991v1

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Yubing Cui

BigTech Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computer predictions smarter by changing how it learns.

Business Areas:
Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Random Forests (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) are two of the most widely used and highly performing classification and regression models. They aggregate equally weighted CART trees, generated randomly in RF or sequentially in XGBoost. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Forests (AF), a novel approach that adaptively selects the weights of the underlying CART models. AF combines (a) the Optimal Predictive-Policy Trees (OP2T) framework to prescribe tailored, input-dependent unequal weights to trees and (b) Mixed Integer Optimization (MIO) to refine weight candidates dynamically, enhancing overall performance. We demonstrate that AF consistently outperforms RF, XGBoost, and other weighted RF in binary and multi-class classification problems over 20+ real-world datasets.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
21 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)