Decision Trees in Machine Learning, Simplified

I did a series of blog posts on different machine learning techniques recently, which sparked a lot of interest. You can see part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you want to learn about classification, clustering, regression, and so on. In that series I was careful to differentiate between a general technique and a specific algorithm like decision trees. Classification, for example, is a general technique used to identify members of a known class like fraudulent transactions, bananas, or high value customers. Read this machine learning post if you need a refresher or are wondering quite what bananas have to do with machine learning.