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Evolutionary induction of a decision tree for large-scale data: a GPU-based approach

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Abstract

Evolutionary induction of decision trees is an emerging alternative to greedy top-down approaches. Its growing popularity results from good prediction performance and less complex output trees. However, one of the major drawbacks associated with the application of evolutionary algorithms is the tree induction time, especially for large-scale data. In the paper, we design and implement a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based parallelization of evolutionary induction of decision trees. We apply a Compute Unified Device Architecture programming model, which supports general-purpose computation on a GPU (GPGPU). The selection and genetic operators are performed sequentially on a CPU, while the evaluation process for the individuals in the population is parallelized. The data-parallel approach is applied, and thus, the parts of a dataset are spread over GPU cores. Each core processes the assigned chunk of the data. Finally, the results from all GPU cores are merged and the sought tree metrics are sent to the CPU. Computational performance of the proposed approach is validated experimentally on artificial and real-life datasets. A comparison with the traditional CPU version shows that evolutionary induction of decision trees supported by GPGPU can be accelerated significantly (even up to 800 times) and allows for processing of much larger datasets.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Grants W/WI/2/2014 (first author) and S/WI/2/2013 (third author) from Bialystok University of Technology founded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education as well as by the Polish National Science Center and a Grant allocated on the basis of decision 2013/09/N/ST6/04083 (second author).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Bialystok University of Technology, Wiejska 45A, 15-351, Białystok, Poland

    Krzysztof Jurczuk, Marcin Czajkowski & Marek Kretowski

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  1. Krzysztof Jurczuk
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  2. Marcin Czajkowski
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  3. Marek Kretowski
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Correspondence to Krzysztof Jurczuk.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Jurczuk, K., Czajkowski, M. & Kretowski, M. Evolutionary induction of a decision tree for large-scale data: a GPU-based approach. Soft Comput 21, 7363–7379 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-016-2280-1

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