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Lect 6-7 Notes Decision Tree

Decision tree

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22 views

Lect 6-7 Notes Decision Tree

Decision tree

Uploaded by

chudailbhoot790
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Decision Trees

https://courses.analyticsvidhya.com/courses/getting-started-with-decision-trees

Introduction:

In the field of machine learning, decision trees are a fundamental and widely used method
for both classification and regression tasks. They are simple yet powerful models that can
be easily visualized and understood, making them popular in various domains such as
finance, healthcare, and marketing. Decision trees excel at capturing complex relationships
within the data and are often used as a building block for more advanced ensemble
learning methods.

Definition:

A decision tree is a flowchart-like structure where each internal node represents a


"decision" based on a specific feature or attribute, each branch represents the outcome of
the decision, and each leaf node represents the final decision or prediction. The tree is
constructed by recursively partitioning the dataset based on the feature values, with the
goal of creating homogeneous subsets in terms of the target variable.

Purpose:
The primary purpose of decision trees is to create a model that can be used to make
predictions or decisions based on input features. Decision trees are used for both
classification and regression tasks, allowing them to handle a wide range of problems in
different domains. The main purposes of decision trees can be summarized as follows:

1. Classification:

- In classification tasks, decision trees are used to predict the class or category that a new
data point belongs to based on its features. For example, in a medical diagnosis scenario,
a decision tree could be used to classify patients into different disease categories based on
symptoms and test results.

2. Regression:

- In regression tasks, decision trees are used to predict a continuous value rather than a
class label. For instance, in real estate, a decision tree could be employed to estimate the
selling price of a house based on its features such as location, size, and amenities.

3. Interpretability:

- Another key purpose of decision trees is their interpretability. Unlike complex black-box
models like neural networks, decision trees can be easily understood and interpreted by
humans. This makes them valuable for explaining the reasoning behind predictions,
especially in fields where model interpretability is crucial, such as healthcare and finance.

4. Feature Importance:

- Decision trees can provide insights into the importance of different features in making
predictions. By analyzing the structure of the tree and the relative placements of features,
we can gain understanding of which features have the most significant impact on the target
variable.

5. Ensemble Methods:

- Decision trees serve as a foundational component of ensemble learning techniques


such as random forests and gradient boosting. These ensemble methods combine multiple
decision trees to improve prediction accuracy and robustness, making decision trees an
essential part of more sophisticated machine learning models.
In conclusion, decision trees are versatile and widely applicable models that are used for
classification, regression, interpretability, and feature analysis. Their intuitive nature,
combined with the ability to handle complex relationships within the data, makes decision
trees a valuable tool in the machine learning arsenal.

Advantages of Decision Trees

Decision trees offer several advantages that make them popular in the field of machine
learning. Their simplicity, interpretability, and ability to handle a variety of data types
contribute to their widespread use in both academic and practical applications. Here are
some key advantages of decision trees:

1. Easy to Understand and Interpret: Decision trees reflect the decision-making process in
a clear and visual manner, similar to a flowchart. This makes them easy for people without
a technical background to comprehend, allowing stakeholders to understand and trust the
decision-making process of the model.

2. Handle Both Numerical and Categorical Data: Decision trees can handle both numerical
and categorical data without requiring extensive data preprocessing. This versatility
reduces the need for data transformation and makes decision trees suitable for a wide
range of applications.

3. Require Little Data Preparation: Unlike many other algorithms, decision trees do not
require extensive data normalization, scaling, or encoding of categorical variables. They
can handle missing values and outliers with minimal impact on their performance.

4. Implicit Feature Selection: Decision trees naturally perform feature selection by


identifying the most relevant features for decision-making at each node. This can help to
identify the most important factors driving the model’s predictions, aiding in feature
engineering and understanding the underlying data.

6. Fast and Efficient for Inference: Once trained, decision trees are relatively fast and
efficient when making predictions on new data. Their hierarchical structure allows for rapid
traversal and decision-making, making them suitable for real-time or large-scale prediction
tasks.
7. Can Handle Multi-Class Classification: Decision trees naturally support multi-class
classification problems without the need for additional complexity or model modifications.

8. Robust to Outliers: Decision trees are robust to outliers in the data since they make
decisions based on the majority class within each partition, rather than being heavily
influenced by individual data points.

In summary, decision trees offer a range of advantages, including ease of interpretation,


flexibility in handling different data types, minimal data preprocessing, implicit feature
selection, non-parametric nature, efficiency in making predictions, versatility in multi-class
classification, robustness to outliers, and straightforward model validation. These
advantages make decision trees a valuable tool for various machine learning tasks.

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