The Decision Tree

For all the talk about personalized medicine, our health care system remains a top-down, doctor-driven system where individuals are too often bit players in their own health decisions. In The Decision Tree, Thomas Goetz proposes a new strategy for thinking about health, one that applies cutting-edge technology to put us at the center of the equation and explains how the new frontier of health care can impact each of our lives.

This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.

If you want to learn how decision trees and random forests work, plus create your own, this visual book is for you. The fact is, decision tree and random forest algorithms are powerful and likely touch your life everyday. From online search to product development and credit scoring, both types of algorithms are at work behind the scenes in many modern applications and services. They are also used in countless industries such as medicine, manufacturing and finance to help companies make better decisions and reduce risk. Whether coded or scratched out by hand, both algorithms are powerful tools that can make a significant impact. This book is a visual introduction for beginners that unpacks the fundamentals of decision trees and random forests. If you want to dig into the basics with a visual twist plus create your own algorithms in Python, this book is for you.

Presents a detailed study of the major design components that constitute a top-down decision-tree induction algorithm, including aspects such as split criteria, stopping criteria, pruning and the approaches for dealing with missing values. Whereas the strategy still employed nowadays is to use a 'generic' decision-tree induction algorithm regardless of the data, the authors argue on the benefits that a bias-fitting strategy could bring to decision-tree induction, in which the ultimate goal is the automatic generation of a decision-tree induction algorithm tailored to the application domain of interest. For such, they discuss how one can effectively discover the most suitable set of components of decision-tree induction algorithms to deal with a wide variety of applications through the paradigm of evolutionary computation, following the emergence of a novel field called hyper-heuristics. "Automatic Design of Decision-Tree Induction Algorithms" would be highly useful for machine learning and evolutionary computation students and researchers alike.

Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design describes an approach to facing two fundamental and unavoidable issues brought about by climate change uncertainty in water resources planning and project design. The first is a risk assessment problem. The second relates to risk management. This book provides background on the risks relevant in water systems planning, the different approaches to scenario definition in water system planning, and an introduction to the decision-scaling methodology upon which the decision tree is based. The decision tree is described as a scientifically defensible, repeatable, direct and clear method for demonstrating the robustness of a project to climate change. While applicable to all water resources projects, it allocates effort to projects in a way that is consistent with their potential sensitivity to climate risk. The process was designed to be hierarchical, with different stages or phases of analysis triggered based on the findings of the previous phase. An application example is provided followed by a descriptions of some of the tools available for decision making under uncertainty and methods available for climate risk management. The tool was designed for the World Bank but can be applicable in other scenarios where similar challenges arise.

Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining; it is the science of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. Decision tree learning continues to evolve over time. Existing methods are constantly being improved and new methods introduced.This 2nd Edition is dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining; to cover all aspects of this important technique, as well as improved or new methods and techniques developed after the publication of our first edition. In this new edition, all chapters have been revised and new topics brought in. New topics include Cost-Sensitive Active Learning, Learning with Uncertain and Imbalanced Data, Using Decision Trees beyond Classification Tasks, Privacy Preserving Decision Tree Learning, Lessons Learned from Comparative Studies, and Learning Decision Trees for Big Data. A walk-through guide to existing open-source data mining software is also included in this edition.This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

Why do people in a certain group behave the way they do? And, more importantly, what specific criteria was used by the group in question? This book presents a method for answering these questions.

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Handbook organizes all major concepts, theories, methodologies, trends, challenges and applications of data mining (DM) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) into a coherent and unified repository. This book first surveys, then provides comprehensive yet concise algorithmic descriptions of methods, including classic methods plus the extensions and novel methods developed recently. This volume concludes with in-depth descriptions of data mining applications in various interdisciplinary industries including finance, marketing, medicine, biology, engineering, telecommunications, software, and security. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Handbook is designed for research scientists and graduate-level students in computer science and engineering. This book is also suitable for professionals in fields such as computing applications, information systems management, and strategic research management.

This practical guide provides nearly 200 self-contained recipes to help you solve machine learning challenges you may encounter in your daily work. If you’re comfortable with Python and its libraries, including pandas and scikit-learn, you’ll be able to address specific problems such as loading data, handling text or numerical data, model selection, and dimensionality reduction and many other topics. Each recipe includes code that you can copy and paste into a toy dataset to ensure that it actually works. From there, you can insert, combine, or adapt the code to help construct your application. Recipes also include a discussion that explains the solution and provides meaningful context. This cookbook takes you beyond theory and concepts by providing the nuts and bolts you need to construct working machine learning applications. You’ll find recipes for: Vectors, matrices, and arrays Handling numerical and categorical data, text, images, and dates and times Dimensionality reduction using feature extraction or feature selection Model evaluation and selection Linear and logical regression, trees and forests, and k-nearest neighbors Support vector machines (SVM), naïve Bayes, clustering, and neural networks Saving and loading trained models