Model explainability is crucial for human users to be able to interpret how a proposed classifier assigns labels to data based on its feature values. We study generalized linear models constructed using sets of feature value rules, which can capture nonlinear dependencies and interactions. An inherent trade-off exists between rule set sparsity and its prediction accuracy. It is computationally expensive to find the right choice of sparsity -- e.g., via cross-validation -- with existing methods. We propose a new formulation to learn an ensemble of rule sets that simultaneously addresses these competing factors. Good generalization is ensured while keeping computational costs low by utilizing distributionally robust optimization. The formulation utilizes column generation to efficiently search the space of rule sets and constructs a sparse ensemble of rule sets, in contrast with techniques like random forests or boosting and their variants. We present theoretical results that motivate and justify the use of our distributionally robust formulation. Extensive numerical experiments establish that our method improves over competing methods -- on a large set of publicly available binary classification problem instances -- with respect to one or more of the following metrics: generalization quality, computational cost, and explainability.

通过利用分布鲁棒优化，我们提出了一个新的公式来学习一组规则集的集合，以在保持计算成本低的同时确保良好的泛化性能，并通过构建一个稀疏的规则集合来解决规则集的稀疏性和预测准确性之间的固有权衡。

应用分布鲁棒优化获得可解释的分类模型