What are some advantages and disadvantages of Decision Trees?

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

The goal of using a Decision Tree is to create a training model that can use to predict the class or value of the target variable by learning simple decision rules inferred from prior data(training data).

The advantages of decision tree methods are:

  • Decision trees are able to generate understandable rules.
  • Decision trees perform classification without requiring much computation.
  • Decision trees are able to handle both continuous and categorical variables.
  • Decision trees provide a clear indication of which fields are most important for prediction or classification.

The disadvantages of decision tree methods:

  • Decision trees are less appropriate for estimation tasks where the goal is to predict the value of a continuous attribute.
  • Decision trees are prone to errors in classification problems with many classes and a relatively small number of training examples.
  • Decision trees can be computationally expensive to train. The process of growing a decision tree is computationally expensive. At each node, each candidate splitting field must be sorted before its best split can be found. In some algorithms, combinations of fields are used and a search must be made for optimal combining weights. Pruning algorithms can also be expensive since many candidate sub-trees must be formed and compared.