Week 47: From Decision Trees to Ensemble Methods, Random Forests and Boosting Methods

 

 

 

Algorithms for Setting up Decision Trees

Two algorithms stand out in the set up of decision trees:

  1. The CART (Classification And Regression Tree) algorithm for both classification and regression
  2. The ID3 algorithm based on the computation of the information gain for classification

We discuss both algorithms with applications here. The popular library Scikit-Learn uses the CART algorithm. For classification problems you can use either the gini index or the entropy to split a tree in two branches.