Newton Trees

This paper presents Newton trees, a redefinition of probability estimation trees (PET) based on a stochastic understanding of decision trees that follows the principle of attraction (relating mass and distance through the Inverse Square Law). The structure, application and the graphical representation of Newton trees provide a way to make their stochastically driven predictions compatible with user’s intelligibility, so preserving one of the most desirable features of decision trees, comprehensibility. Unlike almost all existing decision tree learning methods, which use different kinds of partitions depending on the attribute datatype, the construction of prototypes and the derivation of probabilities from distances are identical for every datatype (nominal and numerical, but also structured). We present a way of graphically representing the original stochastic probability estimation trees using a user-friendly gravitation simile.We include experiments showing that Newton trees outperform other PETs in probability estimation and accuracy.