Fuzzy Decision Trees

Abstract

The first (crisp) decision tree techniques were introduced in the 1960s (Hunt, Marin, & Stone, 1966), their appeal to decision makers is due in no part to their comprehensibility in classifying objects based on their attribute values (Janikow, 1998). With early techniques such as the ID3 algorithm (Quinlan, 1979), the general approach involves the repetitive partitioning of the objects in a data set through the augmentation of attributes down a tree structure from the root node, until each subset of objects is associated with the same decision class or no attribute is available for further decomposition, ending in a number of leaf nodes. This article considers the notion of decision trees in a fuzzy environment (Zadeh, 1965). The first fuzzy decision tree (FDT) reference is attributed to Chang and Pavlidis (1977), which defined a binary tree using a branch-bound-backtrack algorithm, but limited instruction on FDT construction. Later developments included fuzzy versions of crisp decision techniques, such as fuzzy ID3, and so forth (see Ichihashi, Shirai, Nagasaka, & Miyoshi, 1996; Pal & Chakraborty, 2001) and other versions (Olaru & Wehenkel, 2003).