Neural-based approaches for improving the accuracy of decision trees

Abstract

The decision-tree learning algorithms, e.g., C5, are good at dataset classification. But those algorithms usually work with only one attribute at a time. The dependencies among attributes are not considered in those algorithms. Unfortunately, in the real world, most datasets contain attributes, which are dependent. Generally, these dependencies are classified into two types: categorical-type and numerical-type dependencies. Thus, it is very important to construct a model to discover the dependencies among attributes, and to improve the accuracy of the decision-tree learning algorithms. Neural network model is a good choice to concern with these two types of dependencies. In this paper, we propose a Neural Decision Tree (NDT) model to deal with the problems described above. NDT model combines the neural network technologies and the traditional decision-tree learning capabilities to handle the complicated and real cases. The experimental results show that the NDT model can significantly improve the accuracy of C5. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.