Difference between revisions of "Lecture 21 - Decision Trees(Continued) OldKiwi" - Rhea

Revision as of 22:00, 1 April 2008

When the number of categories, c is big, decision tress are particularly good.

Example: Consider the query "Identify the fruit" from a set of c=7 categories {watermelon, apple, grape, lemon, grapefruit, banana, cherry} .

One possible decision tree based on simple queries is the following:

• • To insert the decision tree example on fruits from class**

Three crucial questions to answer

For constructing a decision tree, for a given classification problem, we have to answer these three questions

1) Which question shoud be asked at a given node -"Query Selection"

2) When should we stop asking questions and declare the node to be a leaf -"When should we stop splitting"

3) Once a node is decided to be a leaf, what category should be assigned to this leaf -"Leaf classification"

We shall discuss questions 1 and 2 (3 being very trivial)

Need to define 'impurity' of a dataset such that $ impurity = 0 $ when all the training data belongs to one class.

Impurity is large when the training data contain equal percentages of each class

$ P(\omega _i) = \frac{1}{C} $; for all $ i $

Let $ I $ denote the impurity. Impurity can be defined in the following ways:

• "Entropy Impurity":

$ I = \sum_{j}P(\omega _j)\log_2P(\omega _j) $, when priors are known, else approximate $ P(\omega _j) $ by $ P'(\omega _j) = \frac{# of training patterns in \omega _j}{Total # of training patterns} $

• "Gini Impurity:"

$ I = \sum_{i\ne j}P(\omega _i)P(\omega _j) = \frac{1}{2}[1- \sum_{j}P^2(\omega _j)] $

Ex: when C = 2, $ I = P(\omega _1)P(\omega _2) $