I think data frames are quite memory efficient and can store non-uniform data types (as can vectors in Guile). Generally, a ton of work has gone into making operations on data frames fast. I don't think a normal vector or multi-dimensional array can easily compete. Data frames are probably also compiled to some quite efficient machine code. Not sure whether Guile's native data structures can match that. Maybe they can.

Also I think I did not optimize for memory usage, and my implementation might keep copies of subsets of data points for each branch. I was mostly focused on the algorithm, not that much on data representation.

Another point, that is not really efficiency related, is that data frames come with lots of functionality to handle non-numeric data. If I recall correctly, they have functionality like doing one-hot encoding and such things. My implementation simply assumes all you have is numbers.

There might also be efficiency left on the table in my implementation, because I use the native number types of Guile, which allow for arbitrarily large integers (which one might not need in many cases) and I might even have used fractions, instead of inexact floats.

I guess though, with good, suitable data structures and a bit of reworking the implementation, one could get a production ready thing out of my naive implementation, that is even trivially parallelized and still would have the linear speedup (within some bounds only, probably, because decision trees usually shouldn't be too deep, to avoid overfitting) that my purely functional implementation enables.

Thanks for the links!

For linear algebraic transformation applied to several rows at once, I wholeheartedly agree.

Not so convinced about decision trees though (that process one row at a time).

Yeah, unless you had to deal with arbitrarily large integer features, Guile integers would come with a big efficiency hit.