A neat idea from L. Breiman

[Kevin Vanhorn]

The "back-fitting" algorithm is just an instance of local search [1],
a well-known heuristic technique for combinatorial optimization.

By the way, it was mentioned that Breiman was applying back-fitting to
improving CART trees.  Has he published anything on this yet?  There
was no mention of it in the article Tom Dietterich cited.  It's not
clear to me how you would usefully apply back-fitting or any other
kind of local search to improving a decision tree, as the choice of
how to split a node is highly dependent on how its ancestral nodes
were split.


[1] C. H. Papadimitriou and K. Steiglitz.  Combinatorial Optimization:
Algorithms and Complexity.  Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982.  (See Chap. 19)

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Kevin S. Van Horn          | It is the means that determine the ends.
vanhorn at synapse.cs.byu.edu |