Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

8.7 Summary

■ Classification is a form of data analysis that extracts models describing data classes. A classifier, or classification model, predicts categorical labels (classes). Numeric prediction models continuous-valued functions. Classification and numeric prediction are the two major types of prediction problems.

■ Decision tree induction is a top-down recursive tree induction algorithm, which uses an attribute selection measure to select the attribute tested for each nonleaf node in the tree. ID3, C4.5, and CART are examples of such algorithms using different attribute selection measures. Tree pruning algorithms attempt to improve accuracy by removing tree branches reflecting noise in the data. Early decision tree algorithms typically ...