An Introduction To Decision Trees and Predictive Analytics

Decision trees represent a connecting series of tests that branch off further and further down until a specific path matches a class or label. They're kind of like a flowing chart of coin flips, if/else statements, or conditions that when met lead to an end result. Decision trees are incredibly useful for classification problems in machine learning because it allows data scientists to choose specific parameters to define their classifiers. So whether you're presented with a price cutoff or target KPI value for your data, you have the ability to sort data at multiple levels and create accurate prediction models. Now there are many, many applications that utilize decision trees but for this article, I'm going to focus on using decision trees to make business decisions.