Decision Trees: An Overview

If you've been reading our blog regularly, you have noticed that we mention decision trees as a modeling tool and have seen us use a few examples of them to illustrate our points. This month, we've decided to go more in depth on decision trees--below is a simplified, yet comprehensive, description of what they are, why we use them, how we build them, and why we love them. A decision tree is a popular method of creating and visualizing predictive models and algorithms. You may be most familiar with decision trees in the context of flow charts. Starting at the top, you answer questions, which lead you to subsequent questions.