20 Decision Trees
20200815 Decision trees are widely used in data mining and well supported in R (R Core Team 2026). Decision tree learning deploys a divide and conquer approach, known as recursive partitioning. It is usually implemented as a greedy search using information gain or the Gini index to select the best input variable on which to partition the dataset at each step.
Here we introduce (G. Williams 2026) and (Therneau and Atkinson 2026) for building decision trees. We begin with a step-by-step example of building a decision tree using Rattle, and then illustrate the process using R beginning with Section ??. We cover both classification trees and regression trees.
We have briefly introduced decision trees as an algorithm in Section @ref(sec:algorithms_dtrees) and Chapter @ref(cha:model_template) uses decision trees as the model builder to demonstrate the model template. Examples of decision tree induction are available through the rain, iris, and pyiris packages from MLHub.
References
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