On the Handling of Continuous-Valued Attributes in Decision Tree Generation

Abstract

We present a result applicable to classification learning algorithms that generate decision trees or rules using the information entropy minimization heuristic for discretizing continuous-valued attributes. The result serves to give a better understanding of the entropy measure, to point out that the behavior of the information entropy heuristic possesses desirable properties that justify its usage in a formal sense, and to improve the efficiency of evaluating continuous-valued attributes for cut value selection. Along with the formal proof, we present empirical results that demonstrate the theoretically expected reduction in evaluation effort for training data sets from real-world domains.

Cite

Text

Fayyad and Irani. "On the Handling of Continuous-Valued Attributes in Decision Tree Generation." Machine Learning, 1992. doi:10.1007/BF00994007

Markdown

[Fayyad and Irani. "On the Handling of Continuous-Valued Attributes in Decision Tree Generation." Machine Learning, 1992.](https://mlanthology.org/mlj/1992/fayyad1992mlj-handling/) doi:10.1007/BF00994007

BibTeX

@article{fayyad1992mlj-handling,
  title     = {{On the Handling of Continuous-Valued Attributes in Decision Tree Generation}},
  author    = {Fayyad, Usama M. and Irani, Keki B.},
  journal   = {Machine Learning},
  year      = {1992},
  pages     = {87-102},
  doi       = {10.1007/BF00994007},
  volume    = {8},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/mlj/1992/fayyad1992mlj-handling/}
}