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Decision Trees

Pruning decision trees with misclassification costs

Jeffrey P. BradfordContact Information, Clayton KunzContact Information, Ron KohaviContact Information, Cliff BrunkContact Information and Carla E. BrodleyContact Information

(1)  School of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, 47907 West Lafayette, IN
(2)  Data Mining and Visualization Silicon Graphics, Inc., 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd., 94043 Mountain View, CA
Abstract
We describe an experimental study of pruning methods for decision tree classifiers when the goal is minimizing loss rather than error. In addition to two common methods for error minimization, CART's cost-complexity pruning and C4.5's error-based pruning, we study the extension of cost-complexity pruning to loss and one pruning variant based on the Laplace correction. We perform an empirical comparison of these methods and evaluate them with respect to loss. We found that applying the Laplace correction to estimate the probability distributions at the leaves was beneficial to all pruning methods. Unlike in error minimization, and somewhat surprisingly, performing no pruning led to results that were on par with other methods in terms of the evaluation criteria. The main advantage of pruning was in the reduction of the decision tree size, sometimes by a factor of ten. While no method dominated others on all datasets, even for the same domain different pruning mechanisms are better for different loss matrices.

Contact Information Jeffrey P. Bradford
Email: jbradfor@ecn.purdue.edu

Contact Information Clayton Kunz
Email: clayk@engr.sgi.com

Contact Information Ron Kohavi
Email: ronnyk@engr.sgi.com

Contact Information Cliff Brunk
Email: brunk@engr.sgi.com

Contact Information Carla E. Brodley
Email: brodley@ecn.purdue.edu
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Referenced by
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  1. Carmichael, O. (2004) Shape-based recognition of wiry objects. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 26(12)
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