Using Genetic Algorithms-Based Approach for Better Decision Trees: A Computational Study

Abstract

Recently, decision tree algorithms have been widely used in dealing with data mining problems to find out valuable rules and patterns. However, scalability, accuracy and efficiency are significant concerns regarding how to effectively deal with large and complex data sets in the implementation. In this paper, we propose an innovative machine learning approach (we call our approach GAIT), combining genetic algorithm, statistical sampling, and decision tree, to develop intelligent decision trees that can alleviate some of these problems. We design our computational experiments and run GAIT on three different data sets (namely Socio-Olympic data, Westinghouse data, and FAA data) to test its performance against standard decision tree algorithm, neural network classifier, and statistical discriminant technique, respectively. The computational results show that our approach outperforms standard decision tree algorithm profoundly at lower sampling levels, and achieves significantly better results with less effort than both neural network and discriminant classifiers.