Optimal Decision Trees for Categorical Data via Integer Programming

Decision trees have been a very popular class of predictive models for decades due to their interpretability and good performance on categorical features. However, they are not always robust and tend to overfit the data. Additionally, if allowed to grow large, they lose interpretability. In this paper, we present a novel mixed integer programming formulation … Read more

Production design for plate products in the steel industry

We describe an optimization tool for a multistage production process for rectangular steel plates. The problem we solve yields a production design (or plan) for rectangular plate products in a steel plant, i.e., a detailed list of operational steps and intermediate products on the way to producing steel plates. We decompose this problem into subproblems … Read more