An Experimental Comparison of Old and New Decision Tree Algorithms

This paper presents a detailed comparison of a recently proposed algorithm for optimizing decision trees, tree alternating optimization (TAO), with other popular, established algorithms. We compare their performance on a number of classification and regression datasets of various complexity, different size and dimensionality, across different performance factors: accuracy and tree size (in terms of the number of leaves or the depth of the tree). We find that TAO achieves higher accuracy in nearly all datasets, often by a large margin.