Decision tree modeling using R

• Published in: Annals of translational medicine Vol. 4; no. 15; p. 275
• Main Author: Zhang, Zhongheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: China AME Publishing Company 01.08.2016
• Subjects: Big-data Clinical Trial Column; conditional inference; random forests; R; Machine learning; decision trees; recursive partitioning
• DOI: 10.21037/atm.2016.05.14
• ISSN: 2305-5839

In machine learning field, decision tree learner is powerful and easy to interpret. It employs recursive binary partitioning algorithm that splits the sample in partitioning variable with the strongest association with the response variable. The process continues until some stopping criteria are met. In the example I focus on conditional inference tree, which incorporates tree-structured regression models into conditional inference procedures. While growing a single tree is subject to small changes in the training data, random forests procedure is introduced to address this problem. The sources of diversity for random forests come from the random sampling and restricted set of input variables to be selected. Finally, I introduce R functions to perform model based recursive partitioning. This method incorporates recursive partitioning into conventional parametric model building.