Parallel Implementation of Decision Tree Learning Algorithms

In the fields of data mining and machine learning the amount of data available for building classifiers is growing very fast. Therefore, there is a great need for algorithms that are capable of building classifiers from very-large datasets and, simultaneously, being computationally efficient and scalable. One possible solution is to employ parallelism to reduce the amount of time spent in building classifiers from very-large datasets and keeping the classification accuracy. This work first overviews some strategies for implementing decision tree construction algorithms in parallel based on techniques such as task parallelism, data parallelism and hybrid parallelism. We then describe a new parallel implementation of the C4.5 decision tree construction algorithm. Even though the implementation of the algorithm is still in final development phase, we present some experimental results that can be used to predict the expected behavior of the algorithm.