Learning decision trees with taxonomy of propositionalized attributes

We introduce Propositionalized Attribute Taxonomy guided Decision Tree Learner (PAT-DTL), an inductive learning algorithm that exploits a taxonomy of propositionalized attributes as prior knowledge to generate compact decision trees. Since taxonomies are unavailable in most domains, we also introduce Propositionalized Attribute Taxonomy Learner (PAT-Learner) that automatically constructs taxonomy from data. Our experimental results on UCI repository data sets show that the proposed algorithms can generate a decision tree that is generally more compact than and is often comparably accurate to those produced by standard decision tree learners.