Data Science Tropes: Cowboys and Sirens

In this figure, the leaf nodes are the scores generated by the model, as inferred from the training examples residing in those leaf nodes. In this decision tree, $123.56 foreign transaction is scored at a risk level of 200, while a $123.57 For a one-penny difference in amount, the gradient is then 70,000 score points/dollar, an output variance that is wildly disproportionate to 1¢ difference in inputs. This example vividly illustrates that with the data science--and business--world's increasing emphasis on the explainability, reliability, and consistency of models used for decisioning, decision trees simply lose a lot of their palatability.