Building multi-way decision trees with numerical attributes

Decision trees are probably the most popular and commonly used classification model. They are recursively built following a top-down approach (from general concepts to particular examples) by repeated splits of the training dataset. When this dataset contains numerical attributes, binary splits are usually performed by choosing the threshold value which minimizes the impurity measure used as splitting criterion (e.g. C4.5 gain ration criterion or CART Gini's index). In this paper we propose the use of multi-way splits for continuous attributes in order to reduce the tree complexity without decreasing classification accuracy. This can be done by intertwining a hierarchical clustering algorithm with the usual greedy decision tree learning. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.