Penalized Split Criteria for Interpretable Trees

Abstract

This paper describes techniques for growing classification and regression trees designed to induce visually interpretable trees. This is achieved by penalizing splits that extend the subset of features used in a particular branch of the tree. After a brief motivation, we summarize existing methods and introduce new ones, providing illustrative examples throughout. Using a number of real classification and regression datasets, we find that these procedures can offer more interpretable fits than the CART methodology with very modest increases in out-of-sample loss.