Doing classification using decision trees

Decision trees are the most intuitive among machine learning algorithms. We use decision trees in daily life all the time.

Decision tree algorithms have a lot of useful features:

  • Easy to understand and interpret
  • Work with both categorical and continuous features
  • Work with missing features
  • Do not require feature scaling

Decision tree algorithms work in an upside-down order in which an expression containing a feature is evaluated at every level and that splits the dataset into two categories. We'll help you understand this with the simple example of a dumb charade, which most of us played in college. I guessed an animal and asked my coworker ask me questions to work out my choice. Here's how her questioning went: ...

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