/ Data Science

# Decision trees for classification.

In this third post on supervised machine learning classifiers, I'll be talking about one of the oldest and most widely used techniques - decision trees. Decision trees work well with noisy or missing data and are incredibly fast at runtime. They're additionally nice because you can visualize the decision tree that your algorithm created, so it's not as much as a black box as some of the algorithms. However, because you're making a series of splits based on a single attribute at a time, the decision boundary is only capable of making splits parallel to your feature axes.

Decision trees are pretty easy to grasp intuitively, let's look at an example.

Note: decision trees are used by starting at the top and going down, level by level, according to the defined logic. This is known as recursive binary splitting.

Everybody loves a good meta reference; and yes, I'm sipping tea as I write this post. Now let's look at a two-dimensional feature set and see how to construct a decision tree from data.

Any ideas on how we could make a decision tree to classify a new data point as "x" or "o"? Here's what I did.

Run through a few scenarios and see if you agree. Look good? Cool. So now we have a decision tree for this data set; the only problem is that I created it. It'd be much better if we could get a machine to do this for us. But how?

If you analyze what we're doing from an abstract perspective, we're taking a subset of the data, and deciding the best manner to split the subset further. Our initial subset was the entire data set, and we split it according to the rule $x_1 < 3.5$. Then, for each subset, we performed additional splitting until we were able to correctly classify every data point.

#### Information gain and entropy

How do we judge the best manner to split the data? Simply, we want to split the data in a manner which provides us the most amount of information - in other words, maximizing information gain. Going back to the previous example, we could have performed our first split at $x_1 < 10$. However, this would essentially be a useless split and provide zero information gain. In order to mathematically quantify information gain, we introduce the concept of entropy.

[\mathop - \sum \limits _i^{} {p _i}{\log _2}\left( {{p _i}} \right)]

Entropy may be calculated as a summation over all classes where $p_i$ is the fraction of data points within class $i$. This essentially represents the impurity, or noisiness, of a given subset of data. A homogenous dataset will have zero entropy, while a perfectly random dataset will yield a maximum entropy of 1. With this knowledge, we may simply equate the information gain as a reduction in noise.

Here, we're comparing the noisiness of the data before splitting the data (parent) and after the split (children). If the entropy decreases due to a split in the dataset, it will yield an information gain. A decision tree classifier will make a split according to the feature which yields the highest information gain. This is a recursive process; stopping criterion for this process include continuing to split the data until (1) the tree is capable of correctly classifying every data point, (2) the information gain from further splitting drops below a given threshold, (3) a node has fewer samples than some specified threshold, (4) the tree has reached a maximum depth, or (5) another parameter similarly calls for the end of splitting. To learn more about this process, read about the ID3 algorithm.

#### Techniques to avoid overfitting

Often you may find that you've overfitted your model to the data, which is often detrimental to the model's performance when you introduce new data. To prevent this overfitting, one thing you could do is define some parameter which ends the recursive splitting process. As I mentioned earlier, this may be a parameter such as tree depth or when the split will result in a node less than some specified number of samples. However, it may be more intuitive to simply perform a significance test when considering a new split in the data, and if the split does not supply statistically significant information (obtained via a significance test), then you will not perform any further splits on a given node.

Another more common technique is known as pruning. Here, we grow a decision tree fully on your training dataset and then go back and evaluate its performance on a new validation dataset. For each node, we evaluate whether or not it's split was useful or detrimental to the performance on the validation dataset. We then remove those nodes which caused the greatest detriment to the decision tree performance.

#### Degenerate splits

Evaluating a split using information gain can pose a problem at times; specifically, it has a tendency to favor features which have a high number of possible values. Say I have a data set that determines whether or not I choose to go sailing for the month of June based on features such as temperature, wind speed, cloudiness, and day of the month. If I made a decision tree with 30 child nodes (Day 1, Day 2, ..., Day 30) I could easily build a tree which accurately partitions my data. However, this is a useless feature to split based on because the second I enter the month of July (outside of my training data set), my decision tree has no idea whether or not I'm likely to go sailing. One way to circumvent this is to assign a cost function (in this case, the gain ratio) to prevent our algorithm from choosing attributes which provide a large number of subsets.

#### Example code

Here's an example implementation of a Decision Tree Classifier for classifying the flower species dataset we've studied previously.

import pandas as pd
from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

iris = datasets.load_iris()      # ['target_names', 'data', 'target', 'DESCR', 'feature_names']
features = pd.DataFrame(iris.data)
labels = pd.DataFrame(iris.target)

### create classifier
clf = DecisionTreeClassifier(criterion='entropy')

### split data into training and testing datasets
features_train, features_test, labels_train, labels_test = train_test_split(features, labels, test_size=0.4, random_state=0)

### fit the classifier on the training features and labels
clf.fit(features_train, labels_train)

### use the trained classifier to predict labels for the test features
pred = clf.predict(features_test)

### calculate and return the accuracy on the test data
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
accuracy = accuracy_score(labels_test, pred)

### visualize the decision tree
### you'll need to have graphviz and pydot installed on your computer
from IPython.display import Image
from sklearn.externals.six import StringIO
import pydot
from sklearn import tree

dot_data = StringIO()
tree.export_graphviz(clf, out_file=dot_data)
graph = pydot.graph_from_dot_data(dot_data.getvalue())
Image(graph[0].create_png())


Without any parameter tuning we see an accuracy of 94.9%, not too bad! The decision tree classifier in sklearn has an exhaustive set of parameters which allow for maximum control over your classifier. These parameters include: criterion for evaluating a split (this blog post talked about using entropy to calculate information gain, however, you can also use something known as Gini impurity), maximum tree depth, minimum number of samples required at a leaf node, and many more.