Machine Learning Bookcamp

6 Decision trees and ensemble learning

This chapter covers

• Decision trees and the decision tree learning algorithm
• Random forests: putting multiple trees together into one model
• Gradient boosting as an alternative way of combining decision trees

In chapter 3, we described the binary classification problem and used the logistic regression model to predict if a customer is going to churn.

In this chapter, we also solve a binary classification problem, but we use a different family of machine learning models: tree-based models. Decision trees, the simplest tree-based model, are nothing but a sequence of if-then-else rules put together. We can combine multiple decision trees into an ensemble to achieve better performance. We cover two tree-based ...