Abstract
In representing classification rules by decision trees, simplicity of tree structure is as important as predictive accuracy especially in consideration of the comprehensibility to a human, the memory capacity and the time required to classify. Trees tend to be complex when they get high accuracy. This paper proposes a novel method for generating accurate and simple decision trees based on symbiotic evolution. It is distinctive of symbiotic evolution that two different populations are evolved in parallel through genetic algorithms. In our method one's individuals are partial trees of height 1, and the other's individuals are whole trees represented by the combinations of the former individuals. Generally, overfitting to training examples prevents getting high predictive accuracy. In order to circumvent this difficulty, individuals are evaluated with not only the accuracy in training examples but also the correct answer biased rate indicating the dispersion of the correct answers in the terminal nodes. Based on our method we developed a system called SESAT for generating decision trees. Our experimental results show that SESAT compares favorably with other systems on several datasets in the UCI repository. SESAT has the ability to generate more simple trees than C5.0 without sacrificing predictive accuracy.
