Neural Random Forest Imitation

We present Neural Random Forest Imitation - a novel approach for transforming random forests into neural networks. Existing methods produce very inefficient architectures and do not scale. In this paper, we introduce a new method for generating data from a random forest and learning a neural network that imitates it. Without any additional training data, this transformation creates very efficient neural networks that learn the decision boundaries of a random forest. The generated model is fully differentiable and can be combined with the feature extraction in a single pipeline enabling further end-to-end processing. Experiments on several real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate outstanding performance in terms of scalability, accuracy, and learning with very few training examples. Compared to state-of-the-art mappings, we significantly reduce the network size while achieving the same or even improved accuracy due to better generalization.