Splitting Stump Forests: Tree Ensemble Compression for Edge Devices (extended version)

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.

Citation information

Alkhoury, Fouad; Buschjäger, Sebastian; Welke, Pascal: Splitting Stump Forests: Tree Ensemble Compression for Edge Devices (extended version), Machine Learning, 2025, 114, 10, 219, August, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-025-06866-2, Alkhoury.etal.2025c,