Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules

(mlu-explain.github.io)

98 points | by mschnell 2 hours ago

6 comments

  • kqr 3 minutes ago
    Experts' nebulous decision making can often be modelled with simple decision trees and even decision chains (linked lists). Even when the expert thinks their decision making is more complex, a simple decision tree better models the expert's decision than the rules proposed by the experts themselves. See more in chapter seven of the Oxford Handbook of Expertise. It's fascinating!
  • zelphirkalt 6 minutes ago
    Decision trees are great. My favorite classical machine learning algorithm or group of algorithms, as there are many slight variations of decision trees. I wrote a purely functional (kind of naive) parallelized implementation in GNU Guile: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-ml/src/commit/25...

    Why "naive"? Because there is no such thing as NumPy or data frames in the Guile ecosystem to my knowledge, and the data representation is therefore probably quite inefficient.

  • fooker 47 minutes ago
    Fun fact - single bit neural networks are decision trees.

    In theory, this means you can 'compile' most neural networks into chains of if-else statements but it's not well understood when this sort of approach works well.

    • Almondsetat 22 minutes ago
      Do you know of any software that does this? Or any papers on the matter? It could be a fun weekend project
  • xmprt 1 hour ago
    Interesting website and great presentation. My only note is that the color contrast of some of the text makes it hard to read.
    • thesnide 1 hour ago
      exactly my thought. and here thr reader view of FF is a godsend.

      having 'accessible' content is not only for people with disabilities, it also help with bad color taste.

      well, at least bad taste for readable content ;)

  • moi2388 48 minutes ago
    That was beautifully presented!
  • Jaxon_Varr 1 hour ago
    [dead]