A System for Induction of Oblique Decision Trees

Abstract

This article describes a new system for induction ofoblique decision trees. This system, OC1, combines deterministic hill-climbing with two forms of randomization to find a goodoblique split (in the form of a hyperplane) at each node of a decisiontree. Oblique decision tree methods are tuned especially for domains in which the attributes are numeric, although they can be adapted to symbolic or mixed symbolic/numeric attributes. We presentextensive empirical studies, using both real and artificial data, thatanalyze OC1's ability to construct oblique trees that are smaller and more accurate than their axis-parallel counterparts. We also examinethe benefits of randomization for the construction of oblique decisiontrees.