Responding to user data deletion requests, removing noisy examples, or
deleting corrupted training data are just a few reasons for wanting to delete
instances from a machine learning (ML) model. However, efficiently removing
this data from an ML model is generally difficult. In this paper, we introduce
data removal-enabled (DaRE) forests, a variant of random forests that enables
the removal of training data with minimal retraining. Model updates for each
DaRE tree in the forest are exact, meaning that removing instances from a DaRE
model yields exactly the same model as retraining from scratch on updated data.
DaRE trees use randomness and caching to make data deletion efficient. The
upper levels of DaRE trees use random nodes, which choose split attributes and
thresholds uniformly at random. These nodes rarely require updates because they
only minimally depend on the data. At the lower levels, splits are chosen to
greedily optimize a split criterion such as Gini index or mutual information.
DaRE trees cache statistics at each node and training data at each leaf, so
that only the necessary subtrees are updated as data is removed. For numerical
attributes, greedy nodes optimize over a random subset of thresholds, so that
they can maintain statistics while approximating the optimal threshold. By
adjusting the number of thresholds considered for greedy nodes, and the number
of random nodes, DaRE trees can trade off between more accurate predictions and
more efficient updates.
In experiments on 13 real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset, we find
DaRE forests delete data orders of magnitude faster than retraining from
scratch while sacrificing little to no predictive power.