Decision Trees vs. Neural Networks

Both decision trees, including tree ensembles as well as neural networks are very powerful, very effective learning algorithms. When should you pick one or the other?

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of each.

The figure on the left depicts a 2 layer decision tree and the figure on the right depicts a 2 layer neural network.

Decision trees and tree ensembles will often work well on tabular data, also called structured data.