Practical Predictive Analytics

Advantages of decision trees

Decision trees have many advantages. They can be easily understood by both technical and business people and can be presented in an extremely simplified or detailed way.

They can be specifically tailored to the type of audience, depending upon the inclusion/exclusion of domain-specific variables and the level of complexity. They are most useful when there are a small to medium number of variables that are generally understood, and the goal is to learn about the interactions between them. Decision trees are also good vehicles for storytelling since the natural presentation of a tree, and its splitting mechanism, corresponds well with business rule decision making and each specific node can be examined and questioned ...