Technical Note On the Handling in Decision Tree of Continuous-Valued Attributes Generation
Usama M. Fayyad, Keki B. Irani, Dennis F. Kibler · 1992
We present a result applicable to classification learning algorithms that generate decision trees or rules using the information entropy minimization heuristic for discretizing continuous-valued attributes. The result serves to give a better understanding of the entropy measure, to point out that the behavior of the information entropy heuristic possesses desirable properties that justify its usage in a formal sense, and to improve the efficiency of evaluating continuous-valued attributes for cut value selection. Along with the formal proof, we present em- pirical results that demonstrate the theoretically expected reduction in evaluation effort for training data sets from real-world domains.