Decision Tree Learning - Decision Tree Advantages

Decision Tree Advantages

Amongst other data mining methods, decision trees have various advantages:

• Simple to understand and interpret. People are able to understand decision tree models after a brief explanation.
• Requires little data preparation. Other techniques often require data normalisation, dummy variables need to be created and blank values to be removed.
• Able to handle both numerical and categorical data. Other techniques are usually specialised in analysing datasets that have only one type of variable. Ex: relation rules can be used only with nominal variables while neural networks can be used only with numerical variables.
• Uses a white box model. If a given situation is observable in a model the explanation for the condition is easily explained by boolean logic. An example of a black box model is an artificial neural network since the explanation for the results is difficult to understand.
• Possible to validate a model using statistical tests. That makes it possible to account for the reliability of the model.
• Robust. Performs well even if its assumptions are somewhat violated by the true model from which the data were generated.
• Performs well with large data in a short time. Large amounts of data can be analysed using standard computing resources.