Experiments with an innovative tree pruning algorithm
Mingyu Zhong, Michael Georgiopoulos, Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos · 2007
The pruning phase is one of the necessary steps in decision tree induction. Existing pruning algorithms tend to have some or all of the following difficulties: 1) lack of theoretical support; 2) high computational complexity; 3) dependence on validation; 4) complicated implementation. The 2-norm pruning algorithm proposed here addresses all of the above difficulties. This paper demonstrates the experimental results of the comparison among the 2-norm pruning algorithm and two classical pruning algorithms, the Minimal Cost-Complexity algorithm (used in CART) and the Error-based pruning algorithm (used in C4.5), and confirms that the 2-norm pruning algorithm is superior in accuracy and speed.