The Decision Tree

This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.

For all the talk about personalized medicine, our health care system remains a top-down, doctor-driven system where individuals are too often bit players in their own health decisions. In The Decision Tree, Thomas Goetz proposes a new strategy for thinking about health, one that applies cutting-edge technology to put us at the center of the equation and explains how the new frontier of health care can impact each of our lives.

Presents a detailed study of the major design components that constitute a top-down decision-tree induction algorithm, including aspects such as split criteria, stopping criteria, pruning and the approaches for dealing with missing values. Whereas the strategy still employed nowadays is to use a 'generic' decision-tree induction algorithm regardless of the data, the authors argue on the benefits that a bias-fitting strategy could bring to decision-tree induction, in which the ultimate goal is the automatic generation of a decision-tree induction algorithm tailored to the application domain of interest. For such, they discuss how one can effectively discover the most suitable set of components of decision-tree induction algorithms to deal with a wide variety of applications through the paradigm of evolutionary computation, following the emergence of a novel field called hyper-heuristics. "Automatic Design of Decision-Tree Induction Algorithms" would be highly useful for machine learning and evolutionary computation students and researchers alike.

Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining; it is the science of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. Decision tree learning continues to evolve over time. Existing methods are constantly being improved and new methods introduced.This 2nd Edition is dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining; to cover all aspects of this important technique, as well as improved or new methods and techniques developed after the publication of our first edition. In this new edition, all chapters have been revised and new topics brought in. New topics include Cost-Sensitive Active Learning, Learning with Uncertain and Imbalanced Data, Using Decision Trees beyond Classification Tasks, Privacy Preserving Decision Tree Learning, Lessons Learned from Comparative Studies, and Learning Decision Trees for Big Data. A walk-through guide to existing open-source data mining software is also included in this edition.This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

This book not only discusses the important topics in the area of machine learning and combinatorial optimization, it also combines them into one. This was decisive for choosing the material to be included in the book and determining its order of presentation. Decision trees are a popular method of classification as well as of knowledge representation. At the same time, they are easy to implement as the building blocks of an ensemble of classifiers. Admittedly, however, the task of constructing a near-optimal decision tree is a very complex process. The good results typically achieved by the ant colony optimization algorithms when dealing with combinatorial optimization problems suggest the possibility of also using that approach for effectively constructing decision trees. The underlying rationale is that both problem classes can be presented as graphs. This fact leads to option of considering a larger spectrum of solutions than those based on the heuristic. Moreover, ant colony optimization algorithms can be used to advantage when building ensembles of classifiers. This book is a combination of a research monograph and a textbook. It can be used in graduate courses, but is also of interest to researchers, both specialists in machine learning and those applying machine learning methods to cope with problems from any field of R&D.

The methodology used to construct tree structured rules is the focus of this monograph. Unlike many other statistical procedures, which moved from pencil and paper to calculators, this text's use of trees was unthinkable before computers. Both the practical and theoretical sides have been developed in the authors' study of tree methods. Classification and Regression Trees reflects these two sides, covering the use of trees as a data analysis method, and in a more mathematical framework, proving some of their fundamental properties.

If you want to learn how decision trees and random forests work, plus create your own, this visual book is for you. The fact is, decision tree and random forest algorithms are powerful and likely touch your life everyday. From online search to product development and credit scoring, both types of algorithms are at work behind the scenes in many modern applications and services. They are also used in countless industries such as medicine, manufacturing and finance to help companies make better decisions and reduce risk. Whether coded or scratched out by hand, both algorithms are powerful tools that can make a significant impact. This book is a visual introduction for beginners that unpacks the fundamentals of decision trees and random forests. If you want to dig into the basics with a visual twist plus create your own algorithms in Python, this book is for you.