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Intro to Decision Trees

Sive Lowell

Created on March 13, 2025

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Transcript

An introduction to

decision trees

for classification

START

overview

Decision trees are an important tool in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. They utilize features of a dataset to classify new datapoints. By the end of this lesson, you will understand the logic behind decision trees and practice using them to classify new instances of a datapoint.

Image from mungfali.com

Index

Decision Trees Overview

Practical Uses

Practice!

Decision trees are a way to model decision-making in a tree-like structure, where regular nodes are questions and leaf nodes are decisions. By traversing the tree starting at the root, we can make a decision, whether it's a yes/no problem or a more complicated issue of classification.

What are decision trees?

Key concepts

Entropy is a measure of the uncertainy of a variable. For example, flipping a coin has high entropy because it is uncertain if it will be Heads or Tails.

Entropy

Information gain tells us how much new information is added by a variable. In other words, it if a variable gives us a better understanding of our data, it has high information gain.

Information Gain

The best split feature is the feature that reduces entropy the most. If a certain feature helps us guess how to classify an instance of our dataset, we want to use it early in our tree.

Best Split Feature

More on information theory

In ML, decision trees can be especially useful for classification. When we are given an example of an object, we can traverse our decision tree and ask questions at each node that help us get closer to identifying what our new example is.

practical uses

So, what are decision trees actually used for?

Practice: #1

click to hear an explanation!

Practice: #2

click to hear an explanation!
click to hear an explanation!

Practice: #3

Good work!