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ZTree: A Subgroup Identification Based Decision Tree Learning Framework

Decision trees are a commonly used class of machine learning models valued for their interpretability and versatility, capable of both classification and regression. We propose ZTree, a novel decision tree learning framework that replaces CART's traditional purity based splitting with statistically principled subgroup identification. At each node, ZTree applies hypothesis testing (e.g., z-tests, t-tests, Mann-Whitney U, log-rank) to assess whether a candidate subgroup differs meaningfully from the complement. To adjust for the complication of multiple testing, we employ a cross-validation-based approach to determine if further node splitting is needed. This robust stopping criterion eliminates the need for post-pruning and makes the test threshold (z-threshold) the only parameter for controlling tree complexity. Because of the simplicity of the tree growing procedure, once a detailed tree is learned using the most lenient z-threshold, all simpler trees can be derived by simply removing nodes that do not meet the larger z-thresholds. This makes parameter tuning intuitive and efficient. Furthermore, this z-threshold is essentially a p-value, allowing users to easily plug in appropriate statistical tests into our framework without adjusting the range of parameter search. Empirical evaluation on five large-scale UCI datasets demonstrates that ZTree consistently delivers strong performance, especially at low data regimes. Compared to CART, ZTree also tends to grow simpler trees without sacrificing performance. ZTree introduces a statistically grounded alternative to traditional decision tree splitting by leveraging hypothesis testing and a cross-validation approach to multiple testing correction, resulting in an efficient and flexible framework.

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