Decision Trees — An Intuitive Introduction

Prateek Karkare
AI Graduate
Published in
10 min readJan 18, 2019

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Imagine you are out to buy a cell phone for yourself.

Shopkeeper asks,“How can I help you Ma’am?”
“I am looking for a cell phone”
“You are at the right place, we have over 300 different types of cell phones, what kind of phone would you like to buy today?”
Decision paralysis hits you, totally confused among so many choices of phones you go blank!

Source: xkcd.com

“Let me help you choose a phone ma’am. What screen size would you like?”
“Umm… larger than 5.9 inches”
“Perfect, and how about the camera?”
“Definitely more than 14 Megapixels”
“Alright, and any preferences on the processor?”
“I want a quad core processor with at least 1.2 GHz speed”
“Sure ma’am, I’ve got the perfect phone for you I am sure you will like this one” And he hands over a phone to you.
“Oh Thank You so much this one is good”
“Great choice ma’am, congratulations for your new phone”

What the shopkeeper just did was to help you walk through a decision tree to narrow down your choices. Pictorially it would look like —

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Prateek Karkare
AI Graduate

Rapid AI | Healthcare, Software, Artificial Intelligence | Music & Food