Why skewing works: learning difficult Boolean functions with greedy tree learners

Authors:
Bernard Rosell;Lisa Hellerstein;Soumya Ray;David Page
Affiliations:
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY;Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY;University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI;University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
Venue:
ICML '05 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Machine learning
Year:
2005

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Abstract

We analyze skewing, an approach that has been empirically observed to enable greedy decision tree learners to learn "difficult" Boolean functions, such as parity, in the presence of irrelevant variables. We prove tha, in an idealized setting, for any function and choice of skew parameters, skewing finds relevant variables with probability 1. We present experiments exploring how different parameter choices affect the success of skewing in empirical settings. Finally, we analyze a variant of skewing called Sequential Skewing.