Decision-Path Patterns as Tree Reliability Signals: Path-based Adaptive Weighting for Random Forest Classification

Abstract: Random forests aggregate tree votes by simple majority, treating all trees as equally informative. We observe that the topological pattern along each tree's root-to-leaf decision path -- where and how often the dominant class label flips along it -- carries a signal of tree reliability that is exploitable for per-sample reweighting. The naive use of this signal is structurally confounded with the predicted class, so we propose a class-conditional ratio weighting that guarantees zero expected class bias by construction. On 30 binary classification benchmarks under a shared-forest, shared-split protocol with 30 repeats, the proposed method is the only one among four compared schemes -- RF, weighted RF, KNORA-Eliminate, KNORA-Union -- to yield a statistically significant accuracy improvement over RF (Wilcoxon p = 0.018), while the three alternatives all fail to do so (p > 0.5). It is also the only scheme without majority-recall regressions, with minority-recall regressions limited to 3/30 datasets -- a one-sided loss to which classical dynamic ensemble selection methods are susceptible. The gain is robust across forest sizes from 100 to 1000 trees.