Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: A reported weakness of C4.5 in domains with continuous attributes is addressed by modifying the formation and evaluation of tests on continuous attributes. An MDL-inspired penalty is applied to such tests, eliminating some of them from consideration and altering the relative desirability of all tests. Empirical trials show that the modifications lead to smaller decision trees with higher predictive accuracies. Results also confirm that a new version of C4.5 incorporating these changes is superior to recent approaches that use global discretization and that construct small trees with multi-interval splits.
DOI: 10.1613/jair.279
Author: J. R. Quinlan
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Australian Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W1833977909