A novel approach to build accurate and diverse decision tree forest

Panhalkar, Archana R.; Doye, Dharmpal D.

Decision tree is one of the best expressive classifiers in data mining. A decision tree is popular due to its simplicity and straightforward visualization capability for all types of datasets. Decision tree forest is an ensemble of decision trees. The prediction accuracy of the decision tree forest is more than a decision tree algorithm. Constant efforts are going on to create accurate and diverse trees in the decision tree forest. In this paper, we propose Tangent Weighted Decision Tree Forest (TWDForest), which is more accurate and diverse than random forest. The strength of this technique is that it uses a more accurate and uniform tangent weighting function to create a weighted decision tree forest. It also improves performance by taking opinions from previous trees to best fit the successor tree and avoids the toggling of the root node. Due to this novel approach, the decision trees from the forest are more accurate and diverse as compared to other decision forest algorithms. Experiments of this novel method are performed on 15 well known, publicly available UCI machine learning repository datasets of various sizes. The results of the TWDForest method demonstrate that the entire forest and decision trees produced in TWDForest have high prediction accuracy of 1–7% more than existing methods. TWDForest also creates more diverse trees than other forest algorithms.