What is pruning?

Data Science, AI and ML
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#1

Pruning.

#2

Pruning is applied to a decision tree after the training phase. Basically, we let the tree be free to grow as much as allowed by its settings, without applying any explicit restrictions. In the end, we proceed to cut those branches that are not populated sufficiently so as to avoid overfitting the training data. Indeed, branches that are not populated enough are probably overly concentrating on special data points. This is why removing them should help generalization on new unseen data.