Can a tree decide the best path to take?
Can a tree decide the best path to take?
Imagine you're planning a picnic and trying to decide whether to go to the park or the beach. You want to choose the location with the best weather forecast for your chosen day.
A decision tree helps you make this choice by splitting your decision into smaller parts, like checking the weather forecast for each day until you find the best day for your picnic. The "best" day is determined by how much uncertainty (or randomness) there is in the weather forecast for each day.
Example
You check the weather forecast for each day of the week. On Monday, there's a 70% chance of rain. On Tuesday, there's a 30% chance of rain. The decision tree helps you choose Tuesday because it has less uncertainty (lower entropy) in the weather forecast.
Remember this
The decision tree uses entropy to split nodes in the tree, aiming to reduce uncertainty at each step.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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