An Assessment of Decision Tree based Classification and Regression Algorithms

Decision tree as the name suggests are tree structured predictive model. They are one of the most powerful tools in data mining and machine learning, as it is very easy for a person to derive conclusion from the model's result. A decision tree is one of the popular and easily understood algorithms as its results mimic the human brain, hence are easy to understand derive rules out of these results. These algorithms have even influence in medical sector, helping doctors to make a critical decision for a particular pathology report, it's because of its tree nature even a naive person can understand the meaning and derive conclusion from these trees. In this survey an overview and intuition of some of the popular decision tree models like ID3, C4.5, CHAID and CART are discussed. Methods like pruning are discussed which improve the accuracy of model and its necessity.