What I mean is that decision trees are not seen as optimising a function so it doesn&#x27;t make much sense to think of them as finding optima, or getting stuck in sub-optima (if I may).<p>That&#x27;s the traditional view. I guess it&#x27;s always possible to see decision trees as optimising a binary function, but that&#x27;s probably to be filed under &quot;original research&quot;. Or maybe not- I&#x27;m not sure.<p>In any case, I&#x27;ve never heard of anyone worried that a tree learner would get stuck anywhere. The concern is usually with overfitting.