Data mining with decision trees and decision rules

Abstract

This paper describes the use of decision tree and rule induction in data-mining applications. Of methods for classification and regression that have been developed in the fields of pattern recognition, statistics, and machine learning, these are of particular interest for data mining since they utilize symbolic and interpretable representations. Symbolic solutions can provide a high degree of insight into the decision boundaries that exist in the data, and the logic underlying them. This aspect makes these predictive-mining techniques particularly attractive in commercial and industrial data-mining applications. We present here a synopsis of some major state-of-the-art tree and rule mining methodologies, as well as some recent advances.