NTR organizes and hosts scientific webinars on neural networks and invites speakers from all over the world to present their recent work at the webinars.
On July 13 Arman Zharmagambetov, University of California, Merced, USA, led a technical Zoom webinar on TAO: a New Method to Train Powerful and Efficient Tree-based Models.

About the webinar:
In this talk, I presented a novel algorithm, Tree Alternating Optimization (TAO), to train decision trees and tree-based models; and to show its effectiveness in a number of tasks.
Specifically, I showed that we can build a forest (ensemble of trees), where each tree is trained by the TAO algorithm, which can outperform state-of-the-art forests (like XGBoost, Random Forest, etc.).
Furthermore, I demonstrated that the TAO algorithm is so generic that it can be applied to train hybrids of decision trees and neural nets. The resulting model strikes a good balance between accuracy, model size and interpretability.
Webinar presentation.
Moderator and contact: NTR CEO Nick Mikhailovsky: nickm@ntrlab.com.