PPtree: Projection pursuit classification tree

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new classification tree, the projection pursuit classification tree (PPtree). It combines tree structured methods with projection pursuit dimension reduction. This tree is originated from the projection pursuit method for classification. In each node, one of the projection pursuit indices using class information - LDA, Lr or PDA indices - is maximized to find the projection with the most separated group view. On this optimized data projection, the tree splitting criteria are applied to separate the groups. These steps are iterated until the last two classes are separated. The main advantages of this tree is that it effectively uses correlation between variables to find separations, and it has visual representation of the differences between groups in a 1-dimensional space that can be used to interpret results. Also in each node of the tree, the projection coefficients represent the variable importance for the group separation. This information is very helpful to select variables in classification problems.