Splitting stump forests : tree ensemble compression for edge devices (extended version)

Alkhoury, Fouad and Buschjäger, Sebastian and Welke, Pascal (2025) Splitting stump forests : tree ensemble compression for edge devices (extended version). Machine Learning, 114 (10): 219. ISSN 0885-6125

Abstract

We introduce Splitting Stump Forests—small ensembles of weak learners extracted from a trained random forest. The high memory consumption of random forests renders them unfit for resource-constrained devices. We show empirically that we can significantly reduce the model size and inference time by selecting nodes that evenly split the arriving training data and applying a linear model on the resulting representation. Our extensive empirical evaluation indicates that Splitting Stump Forests outperform random forests and state-of-the-art compression methods on memory-limited embedded devices.