Machine Learning in Action

Chapter 3. Splitting datasets one feature at a time: decision trees

 

This chapter covers

• Introducing decision trees
• Measuring consistency in a dataset
• Using recursion to construct a decision tree
• Plotting trees in Matplotlib

 

Have you ever played a game called Twenty Questions? If not, the game works like this: One person thinks of some object and players try to guess the object. Players are allowed to ask 20 questions and receive only yes or no answers. In this game, the people asking the questions are successively splitting the set of objects they can deduce. A decision tree works just like the game Twenty Questions; you give it a bunch of data and it generates answers to the game.

The decision tree is one of the ...