Data Mining

4

Decision and Regression Trees

Decision and regression tress are used to learn classification and prediction patterns from data and express the relation of attribute variables x with a target variable y, y = F(x), in the form of a tree. A decision tree classifies the categorical target value of a data record using its attribute values. A regression tree predicts the numeric target value of a data record using its attribute values. In this chapter, we first define a binary decision tree and give the algorithm to learn a binary decision tree from a data set with categorical attribute variables and a categorical target variable. Then the method of learning a nonbinary decision tree is described. Additional concepts are introduced to handle ...