Big Data Analytics with Java

Chapter 7. Decision Trees

Decision trees are one of the simplest (and most popular) of machine learning algorithms, yet they are extremely powerful and used extensively. If you have used a flowchart before, then understanding a decision tree won't be at all difficult for you. A decision tree is a flowchart except in this case, the machine learning algorithm builds this flowchart, for you. Based on the input data, the decision tree algorithm automatically internally creates a knowledge base of a set of rules based on which it can predict an outcome when given a new set of data. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Concepts of a decision tree machine learning classifier, including what a decision tree is, how it is built, and how ...