Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

Chapter 8. Trees and Random Forests with Python

Clustering, discussed in the last chapter, is an unsupervised algorithm. It is now time to switch back to a supervised algorithm. Classification is a class of problems that surfaces quite frequently in predictive modelling and in various forms. Accordingly, to deal with all of them, a family of classification algorithms is used.

A decision tree is a supervised classification algorithm that is used when the target variable is a discrete or categorical variable (having two or more than two classes) and the predictor variables are either categorical or numerical variables. A decision tree can be thought of as a set of if-then rules for a classification problem where the target variables are discrete ...