Question

Can you provide an example on how a decision tree might be used in practice?

Answer 1

• Decision tree algorithm falls under the category of supervised learning. They can be used to solve both regression and classification problems.
• Decision tree uses the tree representation to solve the problem in which each leaf node corresponds to a class label and attributes are represented on the internal node of the tree.
• We can represent any boolean function on discrete attributes using the decision tree.

Below are some assumptions that we made while using decision tree:

• At the beginning, we consider the whole training set as the root.
• Feature values are preferred to be categorical. If the values are continuous then they are discretized prior to building the model.
• On the basis of attribute values records are distributed recursively.
• We use statistical methods for ordering attributes as root or the internal node.

As you can see from the above image that Decision Tree works on the Sum of Product form which is also known as Disjunctive Normal Form. In the above image, we are predicting the use of computer in the daily life of the people.

Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to help identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal, but are also a popular tool in machine learning.