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 ...

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