A deterministic annealing approach for parsimonious design of piecewise regression models

A new learning algorithm is proposed for piecewise regression modeling. It employs the technique of deterministic annealing to design space partition regression functions. While the performance of traditional space partition regression functions such as CART and MARS is limited by a simple tree-structured partition and by a hierarchical approach for design, the deterministic annealing algorithm enables the joint optimization of a more powerful piecewise structure based on a Voronoi partition. The new method is demonstrated to achieve consistent performance improvements over regular CART as well as over its extension to allow arbitrary hyperplane boundaries. Comparison tests, on several benchmark data sets from the regression literature, are provided