Tutorial Slides by Andrew Moore, computer scientist at Google, ex-CMU professor

The Decision Tree is one of the most popular classification algorithms in current use in Data Mining and Machine Learning. This tutorial can be used as a self-contained introduction to the flavor and terminology of data mining without needing to review many statistical or probabilistic pre-requisites. If you're new to data mining you'll enjoy it, but your eyebrows will raise at how simple it all is! After having defined the job of classification, we explain how information gain (next Andrew Tutorial) can be used to find predictive input attributes. We show how applying this procedure recursively allows us to build a decision tree to predict future events.