Split Selection Methods for Classification Trees

Prof. Wei-Yin Loh
Statistics Department, UW-Madison

2:30pm, Friday May 5 in 2310 CS

The talk will review the greedy search method of split selection used in the AID and CART algorithms and compare it with a more modern approach based on linear statistical techniques such as t-tests and discriminant analysis. The decision trees produced by the two approaches tend to have comparable classification accuracy and tree size, but the new approach enjoys vastly superior computational speed. Further, the split points chosen by the new approach tend to have smaller variation than those obtained by greedy search.