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Introduction to Decision Trees

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6 views

Introduction to Decision Trees

Uploaded by

vatskumarsourav
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction

to Decision
Trees
Decision trees are a powerful machine learning algorithm
used for both classification and regression tasks. They
work by recursively partitioning the input data based on
feature values, creating a tree-like model of decisions and
their possible consequences.
What are Decision
Trees?
Decision trees are a type of supervised learning
algorithm that can be used to solve both classification
and regression problems. They work by creating a tree-
like model of decisions, where each internal node
represents a feature or attribute, and each leaf node
represents a class label or a numerical value.
How do Decision Trees work?
1 Feature Selection
Decision trees work by recursively selecting the feature that
best separates the input data into distinct classes or values.

2 Splitting
Based on the selected feature, the algorithm splits the data into
subsets, creating branches in the tree.

3 Termination
The process continues until a stopping criterion is met, such as
a maximum depth or a minimum number of samples in a leaf
node.
Advantages of Decision Trees
1 Interpretability
Decision trees are easy to interpret and explain, making them a popular
choice for many applications.

2 Flexibility
Decision trees can handle both numerical and categorical features, making
them a versatile algorithm.

3 Robustness
Decision trees are relatively robust to outliers and can handle missing
values in the data.

4 Feature Selection
Decision trees can automatically select the most important features,
making them useful for feature engineering.
Disadvantages of Decision Trees
Overfitting Bias towards Instability
Categorical
Decision trees can easily Small changes in the training
Features
overfit the training data, Decision trees tend to favor data can result in
leading to poor generalization categorical features over significantly different tree
performance. numerical features, which structures, making the model
can affect the model's less stable.
performance.
Applications of Decision Trees
Classification Regression
Decision trees are widely used for Decision trees can also be used for regression
classification tasks, such as predicting problems, such as predicting house prices,
customer churn, diagnosing medical sales forecasting, and stock market
conditions, and credit card fraud detection. predictions.

Feature Engineering Exploratory Data Analysis


The feature importance information provided Decision trees can help identify patterns and
by decision trees can be used to select the relationships in the data, making them useful
most relevant features for a given problem. for exploratory data analysis.
Building a Decision Tree
Data Preparation
Clean and preprocess the data, handling missing
values, encoding categorical features, and scaling
numerical features.

Feature Selection
Identify the most relevant features that can best
split the data into distinct classes or values.

Tree Construction
Recursively split the data based on the selected
feature, creating a tree-like structure of decisions
and their consequences.
Pruning and Overfitting
Pruning Overfitting Hyperparameter Tuning

To address the problem of Decision trees can easily Adjusting hyperparameters,


overfitting, decision tree overfit the training data, such as the maximum depth
models can be pruned to leading to poor performance of the tree or the minimum
simplify the tree structure on new, unseen data. number of samples in a leaf
and improve generalization Techniques like cross- node, can help find the right
performance. validation and regularization balance between complexity
can help mitigate this issue. and generalization.
Evaluating Decision Tree
Performance

Accuracy
Measure the overall correctness of the model's predictions.

Precision
Evaluate the model's ability to avoid false positives.

Recall
Assess the model's ability to identify all relevant instances.

F1-Score
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Decision trees are a powerful and versatile machine learning algorithm that can be used for both
classification and regression tasks. They offer advantages in terms of interpretability, flexibility, and
feature selection, but also come with challenges such as overfitting and instability. By understanding
the strengths and limitations of decision trees, you can effectively apply them to a wide range of real-
world problems.

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