
Ask HN: Why aren't convolutional decision trees or convolutional SVMs a thing? - phenkdo
Put another way, what made ANNs more suited to convolutional feature extraction from imagery (vs. other ML methods)?
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yorwba
Decision trees and SVMs are too specialized for classification, which makes
them a bad fit for feature extraction. ANNs can be stacked in layers and
trained as a whole, but if you stack two decision trees, how do you propagate
the error signal between them when the classification is incorrect?

On the other hand, you can use ANNs as the feature extraction stage for
decision trees and SVMs, and there are people who do that.

