Chunk #119 — Features and Pitfalls — The “XOR”-Problem and Order Effects

Source

An introduction to recursive partitioning: rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests.

Embedded

yes

Text

In the literature on recursive partitioning, you may come across the so called “XOR”-problem, that describes a situation where two variables show no main effect, but a perfect interaction. In this case, due to the lack of a marginally detectable main effect, none of the variables may be selected in the first split of a classification tree, and the interaction may never be discovered.