Chapter 7. Classifying with decision trees

This chapter covers

  • Working with decision trees
  • Using the recursive partitioning algorithm
  • An important weakness of decision trees

There’s nothing like the great outdoors. I live in the countryside, and when I walk my dog in the woods, I’m reminded just how much we rely on trees. Trees produce the atmosphere we breathe, create habitats for wildlife, provide us with food, and are surprisingly good at making predictions. Yes, you read that right: trees are good at making predictions. But before you go asking the birch in your back garden for next week’s lottery numbers, I should clarify that I’m referring to several supervised learning algorithms that use a branching tree structure. This family of algorithms ...

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