Interpretability Comparison of Popular Decision Tree Algorithms

Abstract

Most of the open-source decision tree algorithms are based on three splitting criteria (Entropy, Gini Index, and Gain Ratio). Therefore, the advantages and disadvantages of these three popular algorithms need to be studied more thoroughly. Comparisons of the three algorithms were mainly performed with respect to the predictive performance. In this work, we conducted a comparative experiment on the splitting criteria of three decision trees, focusing on their interpretability. Depth, homogeneity, coverage, lift, and stability were used as indicators for measuring interpretability. To measure the stability of decision trees, we present a measure of the stability of the root node and the stability of the dominating rules based on a measure of the similarity of trees. Based on 10 data collected from UCI and Kaggle, we compare the interpretability of DT (Decision Tree) algorithms based on three splitting criteria. The results show that the GR (Gain Ratio) branch-based DT algorithm performs well in terms of lift and homogeneity, while the GINI (Gini Index) and ENT (Entropy) branch-based DT algorithms performs well in terms of coverage. With respect to stability, considering both the similarity of the dominating rule or the similarity of the root node, the DT algorithm according to the ENT splitting criterion shows the best results.