Technical note: Some properties of splitting criteria. (English) Zbl 0849.68095

Breiman, Leo

Mach. Learn. 24, No. 1, 41-47 (1996).

Summary: Various criteria have been proposed for deciding which split is best at a given node of a binary classification tree. Consider the question: given a goodness-of-split criterion and the class populations of the instances at a node, what distribution of the instances between the two children nodes maximizes the goodness-of-split criterion? The answers reveal an interesting distinction between the gini and entropy criterion.

MSC:

68R10

Graph theory (including graph drawing) in computer science

Keywords:

split; binary classification tree