DECISION TREE

NUMERICAL
Decision Tree Introduction:
Class:C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’
Data to be classified: X = (age=youth, Income =
medium, Student = yes, Credit_rating = Fair)
Two Steps:
1. Construct Decision Tree from training Data set
2. Predict class of target data using decision tree.

A decision tree for the concept buys computer,

indicating whether a customer at AllElectronics
is likely to purchase a computer. Each internal
(nonleaf) node represents a test on an attribute.
Each leaf node represents a class (either buys
computer = yes or buys computer = no).
2
 Decision Tree Algorithm

1. Place the best attribute of the dataset at the root of the tree.

2. Split the training set into subsets. Subsets should be made in

such a way that each subset contains data with the same value
for an attribute class label.

3. Repeat step 1 and step 2 on each subset until you find leaf
nodes in all the branches of the tree.
4. The ID3 algorithm (Iterative Dichotomiser 3) is a classification technique
that uses a greedy approach to create a decision tree by picking the optimal
attribute that delivers the most Information Gain (IG) or the lowest Entropy
(H).

3
 Decision Tree Algorithm

The below are the some of the assumptions we make while using
Decision tree:
1. At the beginning, the whole training set is considered as
the root.
2. Feature values are preferred to be categorical. If the values are
continuous then they are discretized prior to building the model.
3. Records are distributed recursively on the basis of attribute
values.
4. Order to placing attributes as root or internal node of the tree is
done by using some statistical approach.
The popular attribute selection measures:
1. Information gain
2. Gini index
3. Gain Ratio
4
 Attribute Selection Measure: Information
Gain
■ Select the attribute with the highest information gain
■ Let pi be the probability that an arbitrary tuple in D belongs to
class Ci, estimated by |Ci, D|/|D|
■ Expected information (entropy) needed to classify a tuple in D:

■ Information needed (after using A to split D into v partitions) to

classify D:

■ Information gained by branching on attribute A

5
 Attribute Selection: Information Gain

6
 Attribute Selection: Information Gain

7
 Attribute Selection: Information Gain

8
 Attribute Selection: Information Gain

9
 The attribute age has the highest information gain and therefore becomes the splitting
attribute at the root node of the decision tree. Branches are grown for each outcome of
age. The tuples are shown partitioned accordingly.

Here the data set middle_aged has same class label “yes” hence it become leaf node
labelled with buys computer=“yes” and data subsets youth and senior have different
class label yes and no hence apply same algorithm for both data subsets repeatedly until
unless it converted into leaf node i.e. all tuple has same class label.

10
 Buys
computer
“yes”

11
 buys_
income student credit_rating compu
ter
youth partition D1 high
high
no
no
fair
excellent
no
no
medium yes excellent yes
medium no fair no
low yes fair yes

Gain(income)=0.970-0.40=0.570
Gain(student)=0.970-0.00=0.970 has highest information gain(split point)
Gain(credit_rating)=0.970-0.584=0.387
12
 After splitting partition D1 tree is ?
age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer

“yes”
no yes

incom credit_r buys_co buys

e ating incom credit_rat _co
mputer e ing mpu
high fair no ter
high excellent no mediu
mediu m excellent yes
m fair no low fair yes
Converted into leaf Converted into leaf
13 node “no” node “yes”
 After splitting partition D1 tree is ?
age?

youth middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer

“yes”
no yes

Buys computer Buys computer

“no” “yes”

14
 buys_
income student credit_rating comp
uter
Senior age partition D2 medium no excellent no
medium no fair yes
low yes fair yes
low yes excellent no
medium yes fair yes

Gain(income)=0.970-0.40=0.570
Gain(credit rating)=0.970-0.00=0.970 has highest information gain(split point)
15 Gain(student)=0.970-0.40=0.570
 After splitting partition D2 tree is ?
age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer Credit_rating?

“yes”
no yes Excellent fair
Buys computer Buys computer buys_
buys_
income student comp income student comp
“no” “yes” uter
uter
medium no yes
low yes no low yes yes
Medium no no Medium yes yes

Converted into leaf

Converted into leaf
16 node “yes”
node “no”
Final Decision tree ? age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? yes credit rating?

no yes excellent fair

Buys computer Buys computer Buys computer Buys computer

“No” “Yes” “No” “Yes”

Data to be classified:
X = (age=youth, Income = medium, Student = yes, credit_rating = Fair)
Class of Data X is Buys computer=YES
17
 Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Supervised Learning
■ Unsupervised Learning
■ Statistical Based Algorithm(Bayesian Classification Methods)
■ Distance Based Algorithm(K-Nearest Neighbor)
■ Decision Tree Based Algorithm

1
 Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning
■ Supervised learning (classification)
■ Supervision: The training data (observations,
measurements, etc.) are accompanied by labels indicating
the class of the observations
■ New data is classified based on the training set
■ Unsupervised learning (clustering)
■ The class labels of training data is unknown
■ Given a set of measurements, observations, etc. with the
aim of establishing the existence of classes or clusters in
the data
2
 Prediction Problems: Classification vs.
Numeric Prediction
■ Classification
■ predicts categorical class labels (discrete or nominal)

■ classifies data (constructs a model) based on the training

set and the values (class labels) in a classifying attribute
and uses it in classifying new data
■ Numeric Prediction
■ models continuous-valued functions, i.e., predicts unknown
or missing values
■ Typical applications
■ Credit/loan approval:

■ Medical diagnosis: if a tumor is cancerous or benign

■ Fraud detection: if a transaction is fraudulent

■ Web page categorization: which category it is

3
 Classification—A Two-Step Process
■ Model construction: describing a set of predetermined classes
■ Each tuple/sample is assumed to belong to a predefined class, as
determined by the class label attribute
■ The set of tuples used for model construction is training set
■ The model is represented as classification rules, decision trees, or
mathematical formulae
■ Model usage: for classifying future or unknown objects
■ Estimate accuracy of the model
■ The known label of test sample is compared with the classified

result from the model

■ Accuracy rate is the percentage of test set samples that are

correctly classified by the model

■ Test set is independent of training set (otherwise overfitting)

■ If the accuracy is acceptable, use the model to classify new data

■ Note: If the test set is used to select models, it is called validation (test) set
4
Process (1): Model Construction

Classification
Algorithms
Training
Data

Classifier
(Model)

IF rank = ‘professor’
OR years > 6
THEN tenured = ‘yes’
5
Process (2): Using the Model in Prediction

Classifier

Testing Unseen
Data Data

(Jeff, Professor, 4)

Tenured?

6
 Bayesian Classification
■ A statistical classifier: performs probabilistic prediction, i.e.,
predicts class membership probabilities
■ Foundation: Based on Bayes’ Theorem.
■ Performance: A simple Bayesian classifier, naïve Bayesian
classifier, has comparable performance with decision tree and
selected neural network classifiers
■ Incremental: Each training example can incrementally
increase/decrease the probability that a hypothesis is correct —
prior knowledge can be combined with observed data
■ Standard: Even when Bayesian methods are computationally
intractable, they can provide a standard of optimal decision
making against which other methods can be measured
7
Naïve Bayes Classifier: Training Dataset

Class:
C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’

Data to be classified(Target
Data):
X = (age=youth
Income = medium,
Student = yes
Credit_rating = Fair)

8
 Bayes’ Theorem: Basics

■ Bayes’ Theorem:

■ Let X be a data sample (“evidence”): class label is unknown

■ Let H be a hypothesis that X belongs to class C
■ Classification is to determine P(H|X), (i.e., posteriori probability): the
probability that the hypothesis holds given the observed data sample X
■ P(H) (prior probability): the initial probability
■ E.g., X will buy computer, regardless of age, income, …

■ P(X): probability that sample data is observed

■ P(X|H) (likelihood): the probability of observing the sample X, given that
the hypothesis holds
■ E.g., Given that X will buy computer, the prob X = (age=youth, Income =
medium, Student = yes Credit_rating = Fair)
9
 Prediction Based on Bayes’ Theorem
■ Given training data X, posteriori probability of a hypothesis H,
P(H|X), follows the Bayes’ theorem

■ Informally, this can be viewed as

posteriori = likelihood x prior/evidence
■ Predicts X belongs to Ci iff the probability P(Ci|X) is the highest
among all the P(Ck|X) for all the k classes
■ Practical difficulty: It requires initial knowledge of many
probabilities, involving significant computational cost

10
Classification Is to Derive the Maximum Posteriori
■ Let D be a training set of tuples and their associated class labels,
and each tuple is represented by an n-D attribute vector X = (x1,
x2, …, xn)
■ Suppose there are m classes C1, C2, …, Cm.
■ Classification is to derive the maximum posteriori, i.e., the
maximal P(Ci|X)
■ This can be derived from Bayes’ theorem

■ Since P(X) is constant for all classes hence need not calculate, hence target
data X belongs to Class Ci if and only if for all j!=i.
i.e

11
 Naïve Bayes Classifier
■ A simplified assumption: attributes are conditionally
independent (i.e., no dependence relation between attributes):

12
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Training Dataset

Class:
C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’

Data to be classified:
X = (youth,
Income = medium,
Student = yes
Credit_rating = Fair)

13
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: An Example
■ P(Ci): P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 9/14 = 0.643
P(buys_computer = “no”) = 5/14= 0.357
■ Compute P(X|Ci) for each class
P(age = “youth” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 2/9 = 0.222
P(age = “youth” | buys_computer = “no”) = 3/5 = 0.6
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 4/9 = 0.444
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “yes) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “no”) = 1/5 = 0.2
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
■ X = (age = youth , income = medium, student = yes, credit_rating = fair)
P(X|Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.222 x 0.444 x 0.667 x 0.667 = 0.044
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) = 0.6 x 0.4 x 0.2 x 0.4 = 0.019

P(X|Ci)*P(Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) * P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.028

P(X|buys_computer = “no”) * P(buys_computer = “no”) = 0.007
Therefore, X belongs to class (“buys_computer = yes”)
14
 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Comments
■ Advantages
■ Easy to implement

■ Good results obtained in most of the cases

■ Disadvantages
■ Assumption: class conditional independence, therefore loss of
accuracy
■ Practically, dependencies exist among variables

■ E.g., hospitals: patients: Profile: age, family history, etc.

Symptoms: fever, cough etc., Disease: lung cancer,

diabetes, etc.
■ Dependencies among these cannot be modeled by Naïve

Bayes Classifier
■ How to deal with these dependencies? Bayesian Belief Networks
(Chapter 9)
15
Distance based classification
K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)
 Introduction to K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)
■ KNN is a non-parametric supervised learning technique in which
we try to classify the data point to a given category with the
help of training set.
■ In simple words, it captures information of all training data set
and classifies new target data based on a similarity.
■ Predictions are made for a new instance (x) by searching
through the entire training set for the K most similar cases
(neighbors) and summarizing the output variable for those K
cases.
■ In classification this is the mode (or most common) class value.
 How KNN algorithm works
■ Suppose we have height, weight and T-shirt size of some
customers.
■ We need to predict the T-shirt size of a new customer given
only height and weight information we have.
■ Data including height, weight and T-shirt size information is
shown below –
■ New customer named 'Monica' has height 161cm and weight
61kg. KNN can be used to predict the desired T-shirt size
 Height Weight T Shirt Size
(in cms) (in kgs)
158 58 M
158 59 M
158 63 M
160 59 M
160 60 M
163 60 M
163 61 M
160 64 L
163 64 L
165 61 L
165 62 L
165 65 L
168 62 L
168 63 L
168 66 L
170 63 L
170 64 L
170 68 L
 Step 1 :
Calculate Similarity based on distance function

■ There are many distance functions but Euclidean is the most

commonly used measure. It is mainly used when data is
continuous.
■ Manhattan distance is also very common for continuous
variables.
Height X (in cms) Weight Y (in T Shirt Size (class Distance(X,Y) to
kgs) Label) (161, 61)
158 58 M 4.24
158 59 M 3.61
158 63 M 3.61
160 59 M 2.24
160 60 M 1.41
163 60 M 2.24
163 61 M 2.00
160 64 L 3.16
163 64 L 3.61
165 61 L 4.00
165 62 L 4.12
165 65 L 5.66
168 62 L 7.07
168 63 L 7.28
168 66 L 8.60
170 63 L 9.22
170 64 L 9.49
170 68 L 11.40
Let K=7 arrange table in increasing order by distance. Here class
labels are[M,M,M,M,L,M,M]. Majority is M hence target
data(161,61) will be in class M. Similarly we can check for any K
Height X Weight Y (in T Shirt Size Distance(X,Y) to
(in cms) kgs) (class Label) (161,61)
160 60 M 1.41
163 61 M 2.00
160 59 M 2.24
163 60 M 2.24
160 64 L 3.16
158 59 M 3.61
158 63 M 3.61
163 64 L 3.61
165 61 L 4.00
165 62 L 4.12
158 58 M 4.24
165 65 L 5.66
168 62 L 7.07
168 63 L 7.28
168 66 L 8.60
170 63 L 9.22
170 64 L 9.49
170 68 L 11.40
Let K=15 arrange table in increasing order by distance. Here class
labels are[M,M,M,M,L,M,M,L,L,L,M,L,L,L,L]. Majority is L hence
target data(161,61) will be in class l.
Height X Weight Y (in T Shirt Size Distance(X,Y) to
(in cms) kgs) (class Label) (161,61)
160 60 M 1.41
163 61 M 2.00
160 59 M 2.24
163 60 M 2.24
160 64 L 3.16
158 59 M 3.61
158 63 M 3.61
163 64 L 3.61
165 61 L 4.00
165 62 L 4.12
158 58 M 4.24
165 65 L 5.66
168 62 L 7.07
168 63 L 7.28
168 66 L 8.60
170 63 L 9.22
170 64 L 9.49
170 68 L 11.40
 Pros and Cons of KNN

Pros
■ Easy to understand
■ No assumptions about data
■ Can be applied to both classification and regression
■ Works easily on multi-class problems

Cons
■ Memory Intensive / Computationally expensive
■ Sensitive to scale of data
■ Not work well on rare event (skewed) target variable
■ Struggle when high number of independent variables
 Decision Tree Introduction:
Class:C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’
Data to be classified: X = (age=youth, Income =
medium, Student = yes, Credit_rating = Fair)
Two Steps:
1. Construct Decision Tree from training Data set
2. Predict class of target data using decision tree.

A decision tree for the concept buys computer,

indicating whether a customer at AllElectronics
is likely to purchase a computer. Each internal
(nonleaf) node represents a test on an attribute.
Each leaf node represents a class (either buys
computer = yes or buys computer = no).
25
 Decision Tree Algorithm

1. Place the best attribute of the dataset at the root of the tree.

2. Split the training set into subsets. Subsets should be made in

such a way that each subset contains data with the same value
for an attribute class label.

3. Repeat step 1 and step 2 on each subset until you find leaf
nodes in all the branches of the tree.
4. The ID3 algorithm (Iterative Dichotomiser 3) is a classification technique
that uses a greedy approach to create a decision tree by picking the optimal
attribute that delivers the most Information Gain (IG) or the lowest Entropy
(H).

26
 Decision Tree Algorithm

The below are the some of the assumptions we make while using
Decision tree:
1. At the beginning, the whole training set is considered as
the root.
2. Feature values are preferred to be categorical. If the values are
continuous then they are discretized prior to building the model.
3. Records are distributed recursively on the basis of attribute
values.
4. Order to placing attributes as root or internal node of the tree is
done by using some statistical approach.
The popular attribute selection measures:
1. Information gain
2. Gini index
3. Gain Ratio
27
 Attribute Selection Measure: Information
Gain
■ Select the attribute with the highest information gain
■ Let pi be the probability that an arbitrary tuple in D belongs to
class Ci, estimated by |Ci, D|/|D|
■ Expected information (entropy) needed to classify a tuple in D:

■ Information needed (after using A to split D into v partitions) to

classify D:

■ Information gained by branching on attribute A

28
29
30
Attribute Selection: Information Gain

31
Attribute Selection: Information Gain

32
Attribute Selection: Information Gain

33
Attribute Selection: Information Gain

34
The attribute age has the highest information gain and therefore becomes the splitting
attribute at the root node of the decision tree. Branches are grown for each outcome of
age. The tuples are shown partitioned accordingly.

Here the data set middle_aged has same class label “yes” hence it become leaf node
labelled with buys computer=“yes” and data subsets youth and senior have different
class label yes and no hence apply same algorithm for both data subsets repeatedly until
unless it converted into leaf node i.e. all tuple has same class label.

35
 Buys
computer
“yes”

36
 buys_

youth partition D1 income student credit_rating compu

ter
high no fair no
high no excellent no
medium yes excellent yes
medium no fair no
low yes fair yes

Gain(income)=0.970-0.40=0.570
Gain(student)=0.970-0.00=0.970 has highest information gain(split point)
Gain(credit_rating)=0.970-0.584=0.387
37
 After splitting partition D1 tree is ?
age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer

“yes”
no yes

incom credit_r buys_co buys

e ating incom credit_rat _co
mputer e ing mpu
high fair no ter
high excellent no mediu
mediu m excellent yes
m fair no low fair yes
Converted into leaf Converted into leaf
node “no” node “yes”
38
 After splitting partition D1 tree is ?
age?

youth middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer

“yes”
no yes

Buys computer Buys computer

“no” “yes”

39
 buys_
Senior age partition D2 income student credit_rating comp
uter
medium no excellent no
medium no fair yes
low yes fair yes
low yes excellent no
medium yes fair yes

Gain(income)=0.970-0.40=0.570
Gain(credit rating)=0.970-0.00=0.970 has highest information gain(split point)
Gain(student)=0.970-0.40=0.570
40
 After splitting partition D2 tree is ?
age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? Buys computer Credit_rating?

“yes”
no yes Excellent fair
Buys computer Buys computer buys_
buys_
income student comp income student comp
“no” “yes” uter
uter
medium no yes
low yes no low yes yes
Medium no no Medium yes yes

Converted into leaf

Converted into leaf
node “yes”
node “no” 41
 Final Decision tree ?
age?

youth overcast
middle_aged senior

student? yes credit rating?

no yes excellent fair

Buys computer Buys computer Buys computer Buys computer

“No” “Yes” “No” “Yes”

Data to be classified:
X = (age=youth, Income = medium, Student = yes, credit_rating = Fair)
Class of Data X is Buys computer=YES
42
 Hypothesis Space Search by ID3
■ ID3 searches the space of possible decision trees: doing
hill-climbing on information gain.
■ It searches the complete space of all finite discrete-valued
functions. All functions have at least one tree that represents
them.
■ It maintains only one hypothesis (unlike Candidate-Elimination). It
cannot tell us how many other viable ones there are.
■ It does not do back tracking. Can get stuck in local optima.
■ Uses all training examples at each step. Results are less sensitive to
errors

43
 Hypotheses
■ The hypothesis is defined as the supposition or proposed explanation based
on insufficient evidence or assumptions. It is just a guess based on some
known facts but has not yet been proven. A good hypothesis is testable,
which results in either true or false.
■ Example: Let's understand the hypothesis with a common example. Some
scientist claims that ultraviolet (UV) light can damage the eyes then it may
also cause blindness.
■ In this example, a scientist just claims that UV rays are harmful to the eyes,
but we assume they may cause blindness. However, it may or may not be
possible. Hence, these types of assumptions are called a hypothesis.

44
 Hypothesis in Machine Learning
■ The hypothesis is one of the commonly used concepts of statistics in
Machine Learning. It is specifically used in Supervised Machine learning,
where an ML model learns a function that best maps the input to
corresponding outputs with the help of an available dataset.

45
 Hypothesis space (H):
■ Hypothesis space is defined as a set of all possible legal
hypotheses; hence it is also known as a hypothesis set. It is
used by supervised machine learning algorithms to determine
the best possible hypothesis to describe the target function or
best maps input to output.
■ It is defined as the approximate function that best describes the
target in supervised machine learning algorithms. It is primarily
based on data as well as bias and restrictions applied to data.
■ Hence hypothesis (h) can be concluded as a single hypothesis
that maps input to proper output and can be evaluated as well
as used to make predictions.

46
47
Now, assume we have some test data by which
ML algorithms predict the outputs for input as
follows:

48
49
50
51
52
 Hypothesis in Statistics

Similar to the hypothesis in machine learning, it is also considered an assumption of the

output. However, it is falsifiable, which means it can be failed in the presence of sufficient
evidence.
Unlike machine learning, we cannot accept any hypothesis in statistics because it is just an
imaginary result and based on probability. Before start working on an experiment, we
must be aware of two important types of hypotheses as follows:
•Null Hypothesis: A null hypothesis is a type of statistical hypothesis which tells that
there is no statistically significant effect exists in the given set of observations. It is also
known as conjecture and is used in quantitative analysis to test theories about markets,
investment, and finance to decide whether an idea is true or false.
•Alternative Hypothesis: An alternative hypothesis is a direct contradiction of the null
hypothesis, which means if one of the two hypotheses is true, then the other must be false.
In other words, an alternative hypothesis is a type of statistical hypothesis which tells that
there is some significant effect that exists in the given set of observations.

53
 Computing Information-Gain for
Continuous-Valued Attributes
■ Let attribute A be a continuous-valued attribute
■ Must determine the best split point for A
■ Sort the value A in increasing order
■ Typically, the midpoint between each pair of adjacent values
is considered as a possible split point
■ (ai+ai+1)/2 is the midpoint between the values of ai and ai+1
■ The point with the minimum expected information
requirement for A is selected as the split-point for A
■ Split:
■ D1 is the set of tuples in D satisfying A ≤ split-point, and D2 is
the set of tuples in D satisfying A > split-point
54
 Gain Ratio for Attribute Selection (C4.5)
■ Information gain measure is biased towards attributes with a
large number of values
■ C4.5 (a successor of ID3) uses gain ratio to overcome the
problem (normalization to information gain)

■ GainRatio(A) = Gain(A)/SplitInfo(A)
■ Ex.

■ gain_ratio(income) = 0.029/1.557 = 0.019

■ The attribute with the maximum gain ratio is selected as the
splitting attribute
55
 Gini Index (CART, IBM IntelligentMiner)
■ If a data set D contains examples from n classes, gini index,
gini(D) is defined as

where pj is the relative frequency of class j in D

■ If a data set D is split on A into two subsets D1 and D2, the gini
index gini(D) is defined as

■ Reduction in Impurity:

■ The attribute provides the smallest ginisplit(D) (or the largest

reduction in impurity) is chosen to split the node (need to
enumerate all the possible splitting points for each attribute)
56
 Computation of Gini Index
■ Ex. D has 9 tuples in buys_computer = “yes” and 5 in “no”

■ Suppose the attribute income partitions D into 10 in D1: {low,

medium} and 4 in D2

Gini{low,high} is 0.458; Gini{medium,high} is 0.450. Thus, split on the

{low,medium} (and {high}) since it has the lowest Gini index
■ All attributes are assumed continuous-valued
■ May need other tools, e.g., clustering, to get the possible split
values
■ Can be modified for categorical attributes
57
 Comparing Attribute Selection Measures

■ The three measures, in general, return good results but

■ Information gain:
■ biased towards multivalued attributes
■ Gain ratio:
■ tends to prefer unbalanced splits in which one partition is
much smaller than the others
■ Gini index:
■ biased to multivalued attributes
■ has difficulty when # of classes is large
■ tends to favor tests that result in equal-sized partitions
and purity in both partitions
58
 Other Attribute Selection Measures
■ CHAID: a popular decision tree algorithm, measure based on χ2 test for
independence
■ C-SEP: performs better than info. gain and gini index in certain cases
■ G-statistic: has a close approximation to χ2 distribution
■ MDL (Minimal Description Length) principle (i.e., the simplest solution is
preferred):
■ The best tree as the one that requires the fewest # of bits to both (1)
encode the tree, and (2) encode the exceptions to the tree
■ Multivariate splits (partition based on multiple variable combinations)
■ CART: finds multivariate splits based on a linear comb. of attrs.
■ Which attribute selection measure is the best?
■ Most give good results, none is significantly superior than others
59
 Over fitting and Tree Pruning
■ Overfitting: An induced tree may overfit the training data
■ Too many branches, some may reflect anomalies due to

noise or outliers
■ Poor accuracy for unseen samples

■ Two approaches to avoid overfitting

■ Prepruning: Halt tree construction early ̵ do not split a node

if this would result in the goodness measure falling below a

threshold
■ Difficult to choose an appropriate threshold

■ Postpruning: Remove branches from a “fully grown”

tree—get a sequence of progressively pruned trees

■ Use a set of data different from the training data to

decide which is the “best pruned tree”

60
 Enhancements to Basic Decision Tree Induction

■ Allow for continuous-valued attributes

■ Dynamically define new discrete-valued attributes that
partition the continuous attribute value into a discrete set of
intervals
■ Handle missing attribute values
■ Assign the most common value of the attribute
■ Assign probability to each of the possible values
■ Attribute construction
■ Create new attributes based on existing ones that are
sparsely represented
■ This reduces fragmentation, repetition, and replication

61
 Classification in Large Databases
■ Classification—a classical problem extensively studied by
statisticians and machine learning researchers
■ Scalability: Classifying data sets with millions of examples and
hundreds of attributes with reasonable speed
■ Why is decision tree induction popular?
■ relatively faster learning speed (than other classification
methods)
■ convertible to simple and easy to understand classification
rules
■ can use SQL queries for accessing databases

■ comparable classification accuracy with other methods

■ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)

■ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

62
 Scalability Framework for RainForest

■ Separates the scalability aspects from the criteria that

determine the quality of the tree
■ Builds an AVC-list: AVC (Attribute, Value, Class_label)
■ AVC-set (of an attribute X )
■ Projection of training dataset onto the attribute X and
class label where counts of individual class label are
aggregated
■ AVC-group (of a node n )
■ Set of AVC-sets of all predictor attributes at the node n

63
Rainforest: Training Set and Its AVC Sets

Training Examples AVC-set on Age AVC-set on income

Age Buy_Computer income Buy_Computer

yes no
yes no
high 2 2
<=30 2 3
31..40 4 0 medium 4 2

>40 3 2 low 3 1

AVC-set on
AVC-set on Student
credit_rating
student Buy_Computer Buy_Computer
Credit
yes no rating yes no

yes 6 1 fair 6 2

no 3 4 excellent 3 3

64
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
65
 Using IF-THEN Rules for Classification
■ Represent the knowledge in the form of IF-THEN rules
R: IF age = youth AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
■ Rule antecedent/precondition vs. rule consequent
■ Assessment of a rule: coverage and accuracy
■ ncovers = # of tuples covered by R
■ ncorrect = # of tuples correctly classified by R
coverage(R) = ncovers /|D| /* D: training data set */
accuracy(R) = ncorrect / ncovers
■ If more than one rule are triggered, need conflict resolution
■ Size ordering: assign the highest priority to the triggering rules that has
the “toughest” requirement (i.e., with the most attribute tests)
■ Class-based ordering: decreasing order of prevalence or misclassification
cost per class
■ Rule-based ordering (decision list): rules are organized into one long
priority list, according to some measure of rule quality or by experts
66
 Rule Extraction from a Decision Tree
■ Rules are easier to understand than large
trees age?

■ One rule is created for each path from the <=30 31..40 >40
root to a leaf
student? credit rating?
yes
■ Each attribute-value pair along a path forms a
no yes excellent fair
conjunction: the leaf holds the class
no yes
prediction no yes

■ Rules are mutually exclusive and exhaustive

■ Example: Rule extraction from our buys_computer decision-tree
IF age = young AND student = no THEN buys_computer = no
IF age = young AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = mid-age THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = old AND credit_rating = excellent THEN buys_computer = no
IF age = old AND credit_rating = fair THEN buys_computer = yes
67
Rule Induction: Sequential Covering Method
■ Sequential covering algorithm: Extracts rules directly from training
data
■ Typical sequential covering algorithms: FOIL, AQ, CN2, RIPPER
■ Rules are learned sequentially, each for a given class Ci will cover
many tuples of Ci but none (or few) of the tuples of other classes
■ Steps:
■ Rules are learned one at a time

■ Each time a rule is learned, the tuples covered by the rules are
removed
■ Repeat the process on the remaining tuples until termination
condition, e.g., when no more training examples or when the
quality of a rule returned is below a user-specified threshold
■ Comp. w. decision-tree induction: learning a set of rules
simultaneously
68
 Sequential Covering Algorithm

while (enough target tuples left)

generate a rule
remove positive target tuples satisfying this rule

Examples
Examples covered
covered by Rule 2
Examples
by Rule 1 covered
by Rule 3
Positive
examples

69
 Rule Generation
■ To generate a rule
while(true)
find the best predicate p
if foil-gain(p) > threshold then add p to current rule
else break

A3=1&&A
1=2
A3=1&&A1=2
&&A8=5A3=1

Positive Negative
examples examples

70
 How to Learn-One-Rule?
■ Start with the most general rule possible: condition = empty
■ Adding new attributes by adopting a greedy depth-first strategy
■ Picks the one that most improves the rule quality

■ Rule-Quality measures: consider both coverage and accuracy

■ Foil-gain (in FOIL & RIPPER): assesses info_gain by extending

condition

■ favors rules that have high accuracy and cover many positive tuples
■ Rule pruning based on an independent set of test tuples

Pos/neg are # of positive/negative tuples covered by R.

If FOIL_Prune is higher for the pruned version of R, prune R
71
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
72
 Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Evaluation metrics: How can we measure accuracy? Other
metrics to consider?
■ Use validation test set of class-labeled tuples instead of
training set when assessing accuracy
■ Methods for estimating a classifier’s accuracy:
■ Holdout method, random subsampling
■ Cross-validation
■ Bootstrap
■ Comparing classifiers:
■ Confidence intervals
■ Cost-benefit analysis and ROC Curves

73
Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Confusion Matrix
Confusion Matrix:
Actual class\Predicted class C1 ¬ C1
C1 True Positives (TP) False Negatives (FN)
¬ C1 False Positives (FP) True Negatives (TN)

Example of Confusion Matrix:

Actual class\Predicted buy_computer buy_computer Total
class = yes = no
buy_computer = yes 6954 46 7000
buy_computer = no 412 2588 3000
Total 7366 2634 10000

■ Given m classes, an entry, CMi,j in a confusion matrix indicates

# of tuples in class i that were labeled by the classifier as class j
■ May have extra rows/columns to provide totals
74
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Accuracy,
Error Rate, Sensitivity and Specificity
A\P C ¬C ■ Class Imbalance Problem:
C TP FN P
■ One class may be rare, e.g.
¬C FP TN N
fraud, or HIV-positive
P’ N’ All
■ Significant majority of the

■ Classifier Accuracy, or negative class and minority of

recognition rate: percentage of the positive class
test set tuples that are correctly ■ Sensitivity: True Positive
classified recognition rate
Accuracy = (TP + TN)/All ■ Sensitivity = TP/P

■ Error rate: 1 – accuracy, or ■ Specificity: True Negative

Error rate = (FP + FN)/All recognition rate

■ Specificity = TN/N

75
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics:
Precision and Recall, and F-measures
■ Precision: exactness – what % of tuples that the classifier
labeled as positive are actually positive

■ Recall: completeness – what % of positive tuples did the

classifier label as positive?
■ Perfect score is 1.0
■ Inverse relationship between precision & recall
■ F measure (F1 or F-score): harmonic mean of precision and
recall,

■ Fß: weighted measure of precision and recall

■ assigns ß times as much weight to recall as to precision

76
 Classifier Evaluation Metrics: Example

Actual Class\Predicted class cancer = yes cancer = no Total Recognition(%)

cancer = yes 90 210 300 30.00 (sensitivity
cancer = no 140 9560 9700 98.56 (specificity)
Total 230 9770 10000 96.40 (accuracy)

■ Precision = 90/230 = 39.13% Recall = 90/300 = 30.00%

77
 Evaluating Classifier Accuracy:
Holdout & Cross-Validation Methods
■ Holdout method
■ Given data is randomly partitioned into two independent sets

■ Training set (e.g., 2/3) for model construction

■ Test set (e.g., 1/3) for accuracy estimation

■ Random sampling: a variation of holdout

■ Repeat holdout k times, accuracy = avg. of the accuracies

obtained
■ Cross-validation (k-fold, where k = 10 is most popular)
■ Randomly partition the data into k mutually exclusive subsets,
each approximately equal size
■ At i-th iteration, use D as test set and others as training set
i
■ Leave-one-out: k folds where k = # of tuples, for small sized
data
■ *Stratified cross-validation*: folds are stratified so that class
dist. in each fold is approx. the same as that in the initial data
78
 Evaluating Classifier Accuracy: Bootstrap
■ Bootstrap
■ Works well with small data sets
■ Samples the given training tuples uniformly with replacement
■ i.e., each time a tuple is selected, it is equally likely to be selected
again and re-added to the training set
■ Several bootstrap methods, and a common one is .632 boostrap
■ A data set with d tuples is sampled d times, with replacement, resulting in
a training set of d samples. The data tuples that did not make it into the
training set end up forming the test set. About 63.2% of the original data
end up in the bootstrap, and the remaining 36.8% form the test set (since
(1 – 1/d)d ≈ e-1 = 0.368)
■ Repeat the sampling procedure k times, overall accuracy of the model:

79
 Estimating Confidence Intervals:
Classifier Models M1 vs. M2
■ Suppose we have 2 classifiers, M1 and M2, which one is better?

■ Use 10-fold cross-validation to obtain and

■ These mean error rates are just estimates of error on the true
population of future data cases
■ What if the difference between the 2 error rates is just
attributed to chance?
■ Use a test of statistical significance
■ Obtain confidence limits for our error estimates

80
 Estimating Confidence Intervals:
Null Hypothesis
■ Perform 10-fold cross-validation
■ Assume samples follow a t distribution with k–1 degrees of
freedom (here, k=10)
■ Use t-test (or Student’s t-test)
■ Null Hypothesis: M1 & M2 are the same
■ If we can reject null hypothesis, then
■ we conclude that the difference between M1 & M2 is
statistically significant
■ Chose model with lower error rate

81
 Estimating Confidence Intervals: t-test

■ If only 1 test set available: pairwise comparison

■ For ith round of 10-fold cross-validation, the same cross
partitioning is used to obtain err(M1)i and err(M2)i
■ Average over 10 rounds to get
and
■ t-test computes t-statistic with k-1 degrees of
freedom:
where

■ If two test sets available: use non-paired t-test

where

where k1 & k2 are # of cross-validation samples used for M1 & M2, resp.
82
 Estimating Confidence Intervals:
Table for t-distribution

■ Symmetric
■ Significance level,
e.g., sig = 0.05 or
5% means M1 & M2
are significantly
different for 95% of
population
■ Confidence limit, z
= sig/2

83
 Estimating Confidence Intervals:
Statistical Significance
■ Are M1 & M2 significantly different?
■ Compute t. Select significance level (e.g. sig = 5%)

■ Consult table for t-distribution: Find t value corresponding to

k-1 degrees of freedom (here, 9)

■ t-distribution is symmetric: typically upper % points of

distribution shown → look up value for confidence limit

z=sig/2 (here, 0.025)
■ If t > z or t < -z, then t value lies in rejection region:

■ Reject null hypothesis that mean error rates of M & M

1 2
are same
■ Conclude: statistically significant difference between M
1
& M2
■ Otherwise, conclude that any difference is chance

84
 Model Selection: ROC Curves
■ ROC (Receiver Operating
Characteristics) curves: for visual
comparison of classification models
■ Originated from signal detection theory
■ Shows the trade-off between the true
positive rate and the false positive rate
■ The area under the ROC curve is a ■ Vertical axis
measure of the accuracy of the model represents the true
positive rate
■ Rank the test tuples in decreasing
■ Horizontal axis rep.
order: the one that is most likely to the false positive rate
belong to the positive class appears at
■ The plot also shows a
the top of the list diagonal line
■ The closer to the diagonal line (i.e., the ■ A model with perfect
closer the area is to 0.5), the less accuracy will have an
accurate is the model area of 1.0
85
 Issues Affecting Model Selection
■ Accuracy
■ classifier accuracy: predicting class label
■ Speed
■ time to construct the model (training time)
■ time to use the model (classification/prediction time)
■ Robustness: handling noise and missing values
■ Scalability: efficiency in disk-resident databases
■ Interpretability
■ understanding and insight provided by the model
■ Other measures, e.g., goodness of rules, such as decision tree
size or compactness of classification rules
86
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
87
Ensemble Methods: Increasing the Accuracy

■ Ensemble methods
■ Use a combination of models to increase accuracy

■ Combine a series of k learned models, M , M , …, M , with

1 2 k
the aim of creating an improved model M*
■ Popular ensemble methods
■ Bagging: averaging the prediction over a collection of

classifiers
■ Boosting: weighted vote with a collection of classifiers

■ Ensemble: combining a set of heterogeneous classifiers

88
 Bagging: Boostrap Aggregation
■ Analogy: Diagnosis based on multiple doctors’ majority vote
■ Training
■ Given a set D of d tuples, at each iteration i, a training set Di of d tuples is
sampled with replacement from D (i.e., bootstrap)
■ A classifier model Mi is learned for each training set Di
■ Classification: classify an unknown sample X
■ Each classifier Mi returns its class prediction
■ The bagged classifier M* counts the votes and assigns the class with the
most votes to X
■ Prediction: can be applied to the prediction of continuous values by taking
the average value of each prediction for a given test tuple
■ Accuracy
■ Often significantly better than a single classifier derived from D
■ For noise data: not considerably worse, more robust
■ Proved improved accuracy in prediction
89
 Boosting
■ Analogy: Consult several doctors, based on a combination of
weighted diagnoses—weight assigned based on the previous
diagnosis accuracy
■ How boosting works?
■ Weights are assigned to each training tuple
■ A series of k classifiers is iteratively learned
■ After a classifier Mi is learned, the weights are updated to
allow the subsequent classifier, Mi+1, to pay more attention to
the training tuples that were misclassified by Mi
■ The final M* combines the votes of each individual classifier,
where the weight of each classifier's vote is a function of its
accuracy
■ Boosting algorithm can be extended for numeric prediction
■ Comparing with bagging: Boosting tends to have greater accuracy,
but it also risks overfitting the model to misclassified data
90
 Adaboost (Freund and Schapire, 1997)
■ Given a set of d class-labeled tuples, (X1, y1), …, (Xd, yd)
■ Initially, all the weights of tuples are set the same (1/d)
■ Generate k classifiers in k rounds. At round i,
■ Tuples from D are sampled (with replacement) to form a training set
Di of the same size
■ Each tuple’s chance of being selected is based on its weight
■ A classification model Mi is derived from Di
■ Its error rate is calculated using Di as a test set
■ If a tuple is misclassified, its weight is increased, o.w. it is decreased
■ Error rate: err(Xj) is the misclassification error of tuple Xj. Classifier Mi error
rate is the sum of the weights of the misclassified tuples:

■ The weight of classifier Mi’s vote is

91
 Random Forest (Breiman 2001)
■ Random Forest:
■ Each classifier in the ensemble is a decision tree classifier and is
generated using a random selection of attributes at each node to
determine the split
■ During classification, each tree votes and the most popular class is
returned
■ Two Methods to construct Random Forest:
■ Forest-RI (random input selection): Randomly select, at each node, F
attributes as candidates for the split at the node. The CART methodology
is used to grow the trees to maximum size
■ Forest-RC (random linear combinations): Creates new attributes (or
features) that are a linear combination of the existing attributes (reduces
the correlation between individual classifiers)
■ Comparable in accuracy to Adaboost, but more robust to errors and outliers
■ Insensitive to the number of attributes selected for consideration at each
split, and faster than bagging or boosting
92
 Classification of Class-Imbalanced Data Sets

■ Class-imbalance problem: Rare positive example but numerous

negative ones, e.g., medical diagnosis, fraud, oil-spill, fault, etc.
■ Traditional methods assume a balanced distribution of classes
and equal error costs: not suitable for class-imbalanced data
■ Typical methods for imbalance data in 2-class classification:
■ Oversampling: re-sampling of data from positive class

■ Under-sampling: randomly eliminate tuples from negative

class
■ Threshold-moving: moves the decision threshold, t, so that
the rare class tuples are easier to classify, and hence, less
chance of costly false negative errors
■ Ensemble techniques: Ensemble multiple classifiers
introduced above
■ Still difficult for class imbalance problem on multiclass tasks
93
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
94
 Summary (I)
■ Classification is a form of data analysis that extracts models
describing important data classes.
■ Effective and scalable methods have been developed for decision
tree induction, Naive Bayesian classification, rule-based
classification, and many other classification methods.
■ Evaluation metrics include: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity,
precision, recall, F measure, and Fß measure.
■ Stratified k-fold cross-validation is recommended for accuracy
estimation. Bagging and boosting can be used to increase overall
accuracy by learning and combining a series of individual models.

95
 Summary (II)
■ Significance tests and ROC curves are useful for model selection.
■ There have been numerous comparisons of the different
classification methods; the matter remains a research topic
■ No single method has been found to be superior over all others
for all data sets
■ Issues such as accuracy, training time, robustness, scalability,
and interpretability must be considered and can involve
trade-offs, further complicating the quest for an overall superior
method

96
 References (1)
■ C. Apte and S. Weiss. Data mining with decision trees and decision rules. Future
Generation Computer Systems, 13, 1997
■ C. M. Bishop, Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford University Press,
1995
■ L. Breiman, J. Friedman, R. Olshen, and C. Stone. Classification and Regression Trees.
Wadsworth International Group, 1984
■ C. J. C. Burges. A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition. Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2(2): 121-168, 1998
■ P. K. Chan and S. J. Stolfo. Learning arbiter and combiner trees from partitioned data
for scaling machine learning. KDD'95
■ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and C.-W. Hsu, Discriminative Frequent Pattern Analysis for
Effective Classification, ICDE'07
■ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and P. S. Yu, Direct Discriminative Pattern Mining for
Effective Classification, ICDE'08
■ W. Cohen. Fast effective rule induction. ICML'95
■ G. Cong, K.-L. Tan, A. K. H. Tung, and X. Xu. Mining top-k covering rule groups for
gene expression data. SIGMOD'05
97
 Issues: Evaluating Classification Methods

■ Accuracy
■ classifier accuracy: predicting class label

■ predictor accuracy: guessing value of predicted attributes

■ Speed
■ time to construct the model (training time)

■ time to use the model (classification/prediction time)

■ Robustness: handling noise and missing values

■ Scalability: efficiency in disk-resident databases
■ Interpretability
■ understanding and insight provided by the model

■ Other measures, e.g., goodness of rules, such as decision tree

size or compactness of classification rules

98
 Predictor Error Measures

■ Measure predictor accuracy: measure how far off the predicted value is from
the actual known value
■ Loss function: measures the error betw. yi and the predicted value yi’
■ Absolute error: | yi – yi’|
■ Squared error: (yi – yi’)2
■ Test error (generalization error): the average loss over the test set
■ Mean absolute error: Mean squared error:

■ Relative absolute error: Relative squared error:

The mean squared-error exaggerates the presence of outliers

Popularly use (square) root mean-square error, similarly, root relative
squared error

99
 Scalable Decision Tree Induction Methods

■ SLIQ (EDBT’96 — Mehta et al.)

■ Builds an index for each attribute and only class list and the

current attribute list reside in memory

■ SPRINT (VLDB’96 — J. Shafer et al.)
■ Constructs an attribute list data structure

■ PUBLIC (VLDB’98 — Rastogi & Shim)

■ Integrates tree splitting and tree pruning: stop growing the

tree earlier
■ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)
■ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

■ BOAT (PODS’99 — Gehrke, Ganti, Ramakrishnan & Loh)

■ Uses bootstrapping to create several small samples

100
 Data Cube-Based Decision-Tree Induction
■ Integration of generalization with decision-tree induction
(Kamber et al.’97)
■ Classification at primitive concept levels
■ E.g., precise temperature, humidity, outlook, etc.
■ Low-level concepts, scattered classes, bushy
classification-trees
■ Semantic interpretation problems
■ Cube-based multi-level classification
■ Relevance analysis at multi-levels
■ Information-gain analysis with dimension + level

101
Nearest-Neighbor
Classifier
MTL 782
IIT DELHI
 Instance-Based Classifiers
Set of Stored Cases • Store the training records

……... • Use training records to

Atr1 AtrN Class
predict the class label of
A unseen cases
B
B
Unseen Case
C
Atr1 ……... AtrN
A
C
B
 Instance Based Classifiers
• Examples:
– Rote-learner
• Memorizes entire training data and performs classification only if attributes
of record match one of the training examples exactly

– Nearest neighbor
• Uses k “closest” points (nearest neighbors) for performing classification
 Nearest Neighbor Classifiers
• Basic idea:
– If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck

Compute
Distance Test
Record

Training Choose k of the

Records “nearest” records
Nearest-Neighbor Classifiers
Unknown record l Requires three things
– The set of stored records
– Distance Metric to compute
distance between records
– The value of k, the number of
nearest neighbors to retrieve

l To classify an unknown record:

– Compute distance to other
training records
– Identify k nearest neighbors
– Use class labels of nearest
neighbors to determine the
class label of unknown record
(e.g., by taking majority vote)
 Definition of Nearest Neighbor

X X X

(a) 1-nearest neighbor (b) 2-nearest neighbor (c) 3-nearest neighbor

K-nearest neighbors of a record x are data points

that have the k smallest distance to x
 1 nearest-neighbor
Voronoi Diagram
 Nearest Neighbor Classification
• Compute distance between two points:
– Euclidean distance
d ( p, q )   ( pi
i
q )
i
2

– Manhatten distance
𝑑 𝑝, 𝑞 = 𝑝𝑖 − 𝑞𝑖
𝑖
– q norm distance
𝑑 𝑝, 𝑞 = ( 𝑝𝑖 − 𝑞𝑖 𝑞 ) 1/𝑞
𝑖
• Determine the class from nearest neighbor list
– take the majority vote of class labels among the k-nearest neighbors
y’ = argmax 𝒙𝑖 ,𝑦𝑖 ϵ 𝐷𝑧 𝐼( 𝑣 = 𝑦𝑖 )
𝑣
where Dz is the set of k closest training examples to z.
– Weigh the vote according to distance
y’ = argmax 𝒙𝑖 ,𝑦𝑖 ϵ 𝐷𝑧 𝑤𝑖 × 𝐼( 𝑣 = 𝑦𝑖 )
𝑣
• weight factor, w = 1/d2
 The KNN classification algorithm
Let k be the number of nearest neighbors and D be the set of
training examples.
1. for each test example z = (x’,y’) do
2. Compute d(x’,x), the distance between z and every
example, (x,y) ϵ D
3. Select Dz ⊆ D, the set of k closest training examples to z.
4. y’ = argmax 𝒙𝑖 ,𝑦𝑖 ϵ 𝐷𝑧 𝐼( 𝑣 = 𝑦𝑖 )
𝑣
5. end for
 KNN Classification
$2,50,000

$2,00,000

$1,50,000

Loan$ Non-Default
$1,00,000 Default

$50,000

$0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Age
 Nearest Neighbor Classification…
• Choosing the value of k:
– If k is too small, sensitive to noise points
– If k is too large, neighborhood may include points from other classes

X
 Nearest Neighbor Classification…
• Scaling issues
– Attributes may have to be scaled to prevent distance measures from
being dominated by one of the attributes
– Example:
• height of a person may vary from 1.5m to 1.8m
• weight of a person may vary from 60 KG to 100KG
• income of a person may vary from Rs10K to Rs 2 Lakh
 Nearest Neighbor Classification…
• Problem with Euclidean measure:
– High dimensional data
• curse of dimensionality: all vectors are almost equidistant to the query vector
– Can produce undesirable results
111111111110 100000000000
vs
011111111111 000000000001
d = 1.4142 d = 1.4142

 Solution: Normalize the vectors to unit length

 Nearest neighbor Classification…
• k-NN classifiers are lazy learners
– It does not build models explicitly
– Unlike eager learners such as decision tree induction and rule-based
systems
– Classifying unknown records are relatively expensive
Thank You