CART: Classification and Regression Trees
Dan Steinberg · 2009
The 1984 monograph, “CART: Classification and Regression Trees,” coauthored by Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen, and Charles Stone (BFOS), represents a major milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence, machine learning, nonparametric statistics, and data mining. The work is important for the comprehensiveness of its study of decision trees, the technical innovations it introduces, its sophisticated examples of tree-structured data analysis, and its authoritative treatment of large sample theory for trees. Since its publication the CART monograph has been cited some 3000 times according to the science and social science citation indexes; Google Scholar reports about 8,450 citations. CART citations can be found in almost any domain, with many appearing in fields such as credit risk, targeted marketing, financial markets modeling, electrical engineering, quality control, biology, chemistry, and clinical medical research. CART has also strongly influenced image compression via tree-structured vector quantization. This brief account is intended to introduce CART basics, touching on the major themes treated in the CART monograph, and to encourage readers to return to the rich original source for technical details, discussions revealing the thought processes of the authors, and examples of their analytical style.