Decision Trees
In this course, you will learn how to build and use decision trees and random forests - two powerful supervised machine learning models.
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Decision trees are machine learning models that try to find patterns in the features of data points. Take a look at the tree on this page. This tree tries to predict whether a student will get an A...
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If we're given this magic tree, it seems relatively easy to make classifications. But how do these trees get created in the first place? Decision trees are supervised machine learning models, which...
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In this lesson, we'll create a decision tree build off of a dataset about cars. When considering buying a car, what factors go into making that decision? Each car can fall into four different cla...
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Consider the two trees below. Which tree would be more useful as a model that tries to predict whether someone would get an A in a class? Let's say you use the top tree. You'll end up at a l...
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We know that we want to end up with leaves with a low Gini Impurity, but we still need to figure out which features to split on in order to achieve this. For example, is it better if we split our d...
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We're not quite done calculating the information gain of a set of objects. The sizes of the subset that get created after the split are important too! For example, the image below shows two sets wi...
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Now that we can find the best feature to split the dataset, we can repeat this process again and again to create the full tree. This is a recursive algorithm! We start with every data point from th...
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We can finally use our tree as a classifier! Given a new data point, we start at the top of the tree and follow the path of the tree until we hit a leaf. Once we get to a leaf, we'll use the classe...
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Nice work! You've written a decision tree from scratch that is able to classify new points. Let's take a look at how the Python library [...] implements decision trees. The [...] module contai...
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Now that we have an understanding of how decision trees are created and used, let's talk about some of their limitations. One problem with the way we're currently making our decision trees is that...
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Great work! In this lesson, you learned how to create decision trees and use them to make classifications. Here are some of the major takeaways: * Good decision trees have pure leaves. A leaf is p...
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We've seen that decision trees can be powerful supervised machine learning models. However, they're not without their weaknesses — decision trees are often prone to overfitting. We've discus...
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You might be wondering how the trees in the random forest get created. After all, right now, our algorithm for creating a decision tree is deterministic — given a training set, the same tree ...
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We're now making trees based on different random subsets of our initial dataset. But we can continue to add variety to the ways our trees are created by changing the features that we use. Recall ...
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Now that we can make different decision trees, it's time to plant a whole forest! Let's say we make different [...] trees using bagging and feature bagging. We can now take a new unlabeled point,...
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We're now able to create a random forest, but how accurate is it compared to a single decision tree? To answer this question we've split our data into a training set and test set. By building our m...
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You now have the ability to make a random forest using your own decision trees. However, [...] has a [...] class that will do all of this work for you! [...] is in the [...] module. [......
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Nice work! Here are some of the major takeaways about random forests: * A random forest is an ensemble machine learning model. It makes a classification by aggregating the classifications of many d...
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Decision Trees
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