A Decision Tree Plug-In for DataEngine
Christian Borgelt · 2004
: Inducing decision trees with a top-down algorithm is a well-known and widely used method to construct classifiers from a set of sample cases. In this paper we review this technique in order to demonstrate its relative simplicity and its power to produce comprehensible results. Since the task to induce a classifier from data turns up frequently in applications (e.g. credit assessment, disease detection etc.) no commercial data analysis tool can do without offering a decision tree induction module. Nevertheless, the wellknown data analysis program DataEngine tm has until recently suffered from lacking such a module. This drawback is now removed by a plug-in consisting of a set of user-defined function blocks we implemented and which we describe in this paper. 1 Introduction Decision trees are a well-known type of classifiers. Classifiers, in turn, are programs which automatically classify a case or an object, i.e. assign it according to its features to one of several given classes. ...