Chunk #120 — Features and Pitfalls — The “XOR”-Problem and Order Effects

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

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In such a perfectly symmetric, artificial XOR problem, a tree would indeed not find a cutpoint to start with. However, a logistic regression model would not be able to identify an effect in any of the variables either, if the interaction was not explicitly included in the logistic regression model – and in that case a tree model, where an interaction effect of two variables can also be explicitly added as a potential predictor variable, would do equally well.