Treeffuser: probabilistic prediction via conditional diffusions with gradient-boosted trees

Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Alessandro Antonio Grande, Achille Nazaret, Alp Kucukelbir, David Blei

Keywords: trees, gradient boosting, diffusion, probabilistic predictions, uncertainty quantification

Abstract: Probabilistic prediction aims to compute predictive distributions rather than single point predictions. These distributions enable practitioners to quantify uncertainty, compute risk, and detect outliers. However, most probabilistic methods assume parametric responses, such as Gaussian or Poisson distributions. When these assumptions fail, such models lead to bad predictions and poorly calibrated uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Treeffuser, an easy-to-use method for probabilistic prediction on tabular data. The idea is to learn a conditional diffusion model where the score function is estimated using gradient-boosted trees. The conditional diffusion model makes Treeffuser flexible and non-parametric, while the gradient-boosted trees make it robust and easy to train on CPUs. Treeffuser learns well-calibrated predictive distributions and can handle a wide range of regression tasks---including those with multivariate, multimodal, and skewed responses. We study Treeffuser on synthetic and real data and show that it outperforms existing methods, providing better calibrated probabilistic predictions. We further demonstrate its versatility with an application to inventory allocation under uncertainty using sales data from Walmart. We implement Treeffuser in https://github.com/blei-lab/treeffuser.

Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (for example: variational inference, Gaussian processes)

Submission Number: 19814