ONLamp.com: Building Decision Trees in Python

The decision tree in the figure is just one of many decision tree structures you could create to solve the marketing problem. The task of finding the optimal decision tree is an intractable problem. For those of you who have taken an analysis of algorithms course, you no doubt recognize this term. For those of you who haven't had this pleasure (he says, gritting his teeth), essentially what this means is that as the amount of test data used to train the decision tree grows, the amount of time it takes to do so grows as well--exponentially. While it may be nearly impossible to find the smallest (or more fittingly, the shallowest) decision tree in a respectable amount of time, it is possible to find a decision tree that is "small enough" using special heuristics.