CODEWITHSUNDEEP
machine-learningdecision-tree
joe
joe

Reputation: 45

How are decision trees potentially unstable?

I was reading "Decision Trees for Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner" and one passage states that decision trees are potentially unstable, but it doesn't explain why. How are they unstable?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1864

Answers (2)

Robin Spiess
Robin Spiess

Reputation: 1480

The picture on the website of scikit-learn about decision trees might also help with your intuition about it: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/tree.html

It just shows that over-fitting in decision trees can lead to drastic results.

Upvotes: 1

Gary
Gary

Reputation: 2167

Decision trees can potentially be unstable if there is a small variation in the data that may result in a completely different tree being generated. You can combat this by using a variety of ensemble methods such as bagging, boosting or stacking.

Upvotes: 1

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