Unifying Decision Trees Split Criteria Using Tsallis Entropy

The construction of efficient and effective decision trees remains a key topic in machine learning because of their simplicity and flexibility. A lot of heuristic algorithms have been proposed to construct near-optimal decision trees. Most of them, however, are greedy algorithms which have the drawback of obtaining only local optimums. Besides, common split criteria, e.g. Shannon entropy, Gain Ratio and Gini index, are also not flexible due to lack of adjustable parameters on data sets. To address the above issues, we propose a series of novel methods using Tsallis entropy in this paper. Firstly, a Tsallis Entropy Criterion (TEC) algorithm is proposed to unify Shannon entropy, Gain Ratio and Gini index, which generalizes the split criteria of decision trees. Secondly, we propose a Tsallis Entropy Information Metric (TEIM) algorithm for efficient construction of decision trees. The TEIM algorithm takes advantages of the adaptability of Tsallis conditional entropy and the reducing greediness ability of two-stage approach. Experimental results on UCI data sets indicate that the TEC algorithm achieves statistically significant improvement over the classical algorithms, and that the TEIM algorithm yields significantly better decision trees in both classification accuracy and tree complexity.