pruned

Pruned is the past participle of prune. In ordinary usage, it describes something that has been trimmed or cut away, especially living plants, branches, or stems that have been removed to improve health, shape, or productivity.

In horticulture and agriculture, pruned plants are often trimmed to remove dead or diseased wood, control size and form, or stimulate flowering and fruiting. Common techniques include thinning cuts, which remove a branch at its point of origin, and heading cuts, which shorten a branch to an interior bud. Pruning schedules and methods vary by species, climate, and cultivation goals, and improper pruning can damage plant health.

In computer science and related fields, pruning denotes the selective removal of parts of a model or search space to reduce complexity. Decision tree pruning reduces the size of a tree by removing branches that contribute little to predictive power, improving generalization. Methods include pre-pruning, which stops growth early, and post-pruning, which trims after full growth. In neural networks, pruning eliminates weights or entire neurons to reduce size and inference time, often with minimal loss of accuracy. Pruning also appears in search algorithms, such as alpha-beta pruning in game-playing programs, which skips evaluating branches that cannot affect the final decision.

Beyond technical uses, pruned can describe any object or plan that has been streamlined by removing unnecessary elements, such as a pruned manuscript or a pruned landscape, to enhance clarity or efficiency. See also pruning.