Budding Trees

We propose a new decision tree model, named the budding tree, where a node can be both a leaf and an internal decision node. Each bud node starts as a leaf node, can then grow children, but then later on, if necessary, its children can be pruned. This contrasts with traditional tree construction algorithms that only grows the tree during the training phase, and prunes it in a separate pruning phase. We use a soft tree architecture and show that the tree and its parameters can be trained using gradient-descent. Our experimental results on regression, binary classification, and multi-class classification data sets indicate that our newly proposed model has better performance than traditional trees in terms of accuracy while inducing trees of comparable size.