Machine Learning in Action

Chapter 9. Tree-based regression

 

This chapter covers

• The CART algorithm
• Regression and model trees
• Tree-pruning algorithms
• Building a GUI in Python

 

The linear regression methods we looked at in chapter 8 contain some powerful methods. These methods create a model that needs to work for all of the data points (locally weighted linear regression is the exception). When the data has many features that interact in complicated ways, building a global model can be difficult if not foolish. We know there are many nonlinearities in real life. How can we expect to model everything with a global linear model?

One way to build a model for our data is to subdivide the data into sections that can be modeled easily. These partitions ...