We propose to use variable selection methods based on penalized regression for pruning decision tree ensembles. Pruning methods based on LASSO and SCAD are compared with the cluster pruning method. Comparative studies are performed on some artificial datasets and real datasets. According to the results of comparative studies, the proposed methods based on penalized regression reduce the size of boosting ensembles without decreasing accuracy significantly and have better performance than the cluster pruning method. In terms of classification noise, the proposed pruning methods can mitigate the weakness of AdaBoost to some degree.