Classification and Regression Trees

Learn about CART in this guest post by Jillur Quddus, a lead technical architect, polyglot software engineer and data scientist with over 10 years of hands-on experience in architecting and engineering distributed, scalable, high-performance, and secure solutions used to combat serious organized crime, cybercrime, and fraud. Although both linear regression models allow and logistic regression models allow us to predict a categorical outcome, both of these models assume a linear relationship between variables. Classification and Regression Trees (CART) overcome this problem by generating Decision Trees. These decision trees can then be traversed to come to a final decision, where the outcome can either be numerical (regression trees) or categorical (classification trees). When traversing decision trees, start at the top. Thereafter, traverse left for yes, or positive responses, and traverse right for no, or negative responses.