Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow

Chapter 6. Decision Trees

Like SVMs, Decision Trees are versatile Machine Learning algorithms that can perform both classification and regression tasks, and even multioutput tasks. They are very powerful algorithms, capable of fitting complex datasets. For example, in Chapter 2 you trained a DecisionTreeRegressor model on the California housing dataset, fitting it perfectly (actually overfitting it).

Decision Trees are also the fundamental components of Random Forests (see Chapter 7), which are among the most powerful Machine Learning algorithms available today.

In this chapter we will start by discussing how to train, visualize, and make predictions with Decision Trees. Then we will go through the CART training algorithm used by Scikit-Learn, and we will discuss how to regularize trees and use them for regression tasks. Finally, we will discuss some of the limitations of Decision Trees.

Training and Visualizing a Decision Tree

To understand Decision Trees, let’s just build one and take a look at how it makes predictions. The following code trains a DecisionTreeClassifier on the iris dataset (see Chapter 4):

from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier

iris = load_iris()
X = iris.data[:, 2:] # petal length and width
y = iris.target

tree_clf = DecisionTreeClassifier(max_depth=2)
tree_clf.fit(X, y)

You can visualize the trained Decision Tree by first using the export_graphviz() method to output a graph definition file called iris_tree.dot ...