Chunk #53 — The Methods — How Do Classification and Regression Trees Work? — What is Wrong with Trees?

Source

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

Embedded

yes

Text

Thus, as an undesired side effect of the recursive partitioning approach, the entire tree structure could be altered if the first splitting variable, or only the first cutpoint, was chosen differently due to a small change in the learning data. Due to this instability, the predictions of single trees show a high variability.