Consider the Decision Tree | Random Realizations

[utterances-bot]

Consider the Decision Tree | Random Realizations

Understand the core strengths and weaknesses of the decision tree, and see how ensembling makes trees shine.

https://blog.mattbowers.dev/consider-the-decision-tree

[WillHaack]

Heyo, took a read through this one to explore something I know little about ! What I learned is there is a generalized tool that makes a decision tree for any given set of data. My intuition tells me this is most useful when you have a reduced range (aka fewer number of targets.) But that may be the case of all learning models, i don't know.

You mention a bias-variance tradeoff in the "How ensembling making trees shine" section, and explained how the ensemble reduces variance, but I don't think you explained how bias is increased, and that isn't immediately obvious to me.

Cheers and here's to more blogging.

P.S. I was a bit pet peeved to have to login to comment. It's better to leave your blog open to comments w/o a login requirement, there's no reason an interested reader should have to jump through GitHub's (or any other company's) account creation hoops to be able to respond to what you have to say. This login was particularly annoying because I had to share a bunch of my GitHub account's privileges with utteranc.es to be able to comment.

[mcb00]

Yo @WillHaack thanks for the great callouts. Regarding the bias variance tradeoff , you're absolutely right, I didn't address what happens to bias when we decrease variance vby ensembling. Averaging over model predictions reduces variance without increasing bias because expected prediction value of an individual model is the same as that of the ensemble. I updated the text accordingly.

As for the comments, again I agree with you. I looked at several solutions for login-free comments on static sites like this one, but couldn't find anything that didn't involve running my own server (which defeats much of the convenience of the static site approach). Most non web-dev experts seem to use Disqus, which is absolutely horrendous, showing adds and other nonsense to readers. So I landed on utterances, which leverages Github issues to store and serve the comments. Since I figure readers of this blog will have Github accounts already, this seemed like an acceptable compromise.

How would you recommend running login-free comments on a static site like this?

[mcb00]

@WillHaack at long last, login-free comments have arrived at Random Realizations. Thanks for speaking up about it here in the old GitHub-based comment system, and thanks for discussing with me at length how to accomplish login-free comments on this blog!