The biases of decision tree pruning strategies

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Abstract

Post pruning of decision trees has been a successful approach in many real-world experiments, but over all possible concepts it does not bring any inherent improvement to an algorithm’s performance. This work explores how a PAC-proven decision tree learning algorithm fares in comparison with two variants of the normal top-down induction of decision trees. The algorithm does not prune its hypothesis per se, but it can be understood to do pre-pruning of the evolving tree. We study a backtracking search algorithm, called Rank, for learning rank-minimal decision trees. Our experiments follow closely those performed by Schaffer [20]. They confirm the main findings of Schaffer: in learning concepts with simple description pruning works, for concepts with a complex description and when all concepts are equally likely pruning is injurious, rather than beneficial, to the average performance of the greedy top-down induction of decision trees. Pre-pruning, as a gentler technique, settles in the average performance in the middle ground between not pruning at all and post pruning.

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APA

Elomaa, T. (1999). The biases of decision tree pruning strategies. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 1642, pp. 63–74). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48412-4_6

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