A New Method for Learning Decision Trees from Rules

Abstract

Most of the methods that generate decision trees use examples of data instances in the decision tree generation process. This paper proposes a method called RBDT-1- rule based decision tree -for learning a decision tree from a set of decision rules that cover the data instances rather than from the data instances themselves. RBDT-1 method uses a set of declarative rules as an input for generating a decision tree. The method’s goal is to create on-demand a short and accurate decision tree from a stable or dynamically changing set of rules. We conduct a comparative study of RBDT-1 with three existing decision tree methods based on different problems. The outcome of the study shows that RBDT-1 performs better than AQDT-1 and AQDT-2 which are methods that create decision trees from rules and than ID3 which generates decision trees from data examples, in terms of tree complexity (number of nodes and leaves in the decision tree.