Time limit ignored on Linux about generalizedoptimalsparsedecisiontrees HOT 5 OPEN

Hi @mnaylor5! Sorry for the late response to this issue.

It appears this is a bug caused by the polling frequency of the optimizer, this is controlled by a configuration in src/optimizer.hpp:88
The tick-duration member controls how many iterations the optimizer goes through before checking the time.
Since iterations were very fast for our experiments, 10000 iterations per check was a suitable balance between not spending too much time checking the clock and still stopping reasonably close to the desired time limit.

For the dataset you provided, it appears the iterations can be much slower which is likely due to the large branching factor. So checking every 10000 iterations wouldn't work very well. As an immediate solution I was able to get a more reasonable stopping precision with a tick-duration of 10 iterations. (Simply change the 1000 to 10 src/optimizer.hpp:88) and recompile the program.

This should fix things for your specific case. I'll try to think about what might be a more general solution.

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Hi @mnaylor5,

Did you manage a way to fix or workaround this issue? I am also trying out the library and noticing that the time limit setting is ignored. I am running Ubuntu 10.04.

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Hi @abhishek-ghose, sorry for the slow response. I have not figured out a workaround - I've been using other optimal tree libraries instead.

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Thank you @mnaylor5!

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Hey @Jimmy-Lin - thanks for the response! I made the change you suggested, and it seems to successfully enforce the time limit.

This seems to lead to a couple of other issues. First, there seems to be a memory leak or something causing excessive RAM usage. This dataset is pretty small (614 observations in the training set, 8 continuous features, and a binary classification target), but a training run with a 1hr time limit uses ~190GB of RAM. The second is that I'm still getting the exact same basic tree as the output of that 1hr run on a larger machine (32 cores and 208GB RAM) - is this expected? I would think that it should have improved from the initial tree within an hour of searching, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again!

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