This article introduces a popular and easy-to-use datamining tool called a decision tree that should help you solve your marketing dilemma.

Decision trees are a topic of artificial intelligence. More specifically, they belong to the subfield of machine learning. This is due to their ability to learn–through example–to classify individual records in a data set.

This article will give you a closer look at what decision trees are, and how they can help you in your endeavors to more effectively target your marketing campaign toward your core customers. In so doing, I’ll go over a few different uses for decision trees (aside from the aforementioned marketing scenario), and I’ll discuss one popular heuristic that can be used during the learning process to create the most effective decision tree. Finally, I’ll implement a simple decision tree program using the Python programming language.

I’ll be waiting for Rippee to port this using Ruby *hint hint*

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 11:15 am and is filed under Programming, Technology, UnderpaidLoveMonki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.