Classification trees

Classification trees are used to predict a category or class. This is similar to the classification algorithms that you have learned about previously in this book, such as the k-nearest neighbors algorithm or logistic regression.

Broadly speaking, there are three tree based algorithms that are used to solve classification problems:

• The decision tree classifier
• The random forest classifier
• The AdaBoost classifier

In this section, you will learn how each of these tree based algorithms works, in order to classify a row of data as a particular class or category.

The decision tree classifier

The decision tree is the simplest tree based algorithm, and serves as the foundation for the other two algorithms....