Question

What do you see as the pros and cons to decision tree analysis? When do you see being able to apply it to your personal or professional life?

Answer 1

The major advantages of decision tree analysis are:

• Helps to consider all the possible outcomes of a scenario
• Decision tree is very interpretable and easy to understand
• With the use of decision tree analysis, missing data and irrelevant attributes can be handled easily
• It is very compact and crisp

The major disadvantages of decision tree analysis are:

• The outcomes are totally dependent on the expectation or objective of the analysis; so the interpretation can be biased
• Complexity gets high if there are many decisions to make
• Gets to exponential calculation growth

If in my personal or professional life, a situation has 3-4 decisions involved, I would apply decision tree analysis to interpret the possible outcome. It can be used in marketing decision analysis or consumer service interpretation.

In personal life application, usage of decision tree can end up with plenty of choices. A simple example of making weekend plans when parents are visiting the town is given below: