How do we set it up?

In simplified terms, the process of training a decision tree and predicting the target features of query instances is as follows:

  1. Present a dataset containing of a number of training instances characterized by a number of descriptive features and a target feature
  2. Train the decision tree model by continuously splitting the target feature along the values of the descriptive features using a measure of information gain during the training process
  3. Grow the tree until we accomplish a stopping criteria create leaf nodes which represent the predictions we want to make for new query instances
  4. Show query instances to the tree and run down the tree until we arrive at leaf nodes
Then we are essentially done!