Why Decision Trees?

A fundamental algorithm

Decision trees are a fundamental machine learning algorithm taught in many (if not all) university courses on machine learning, data science, and data mining. Decision trees are considered a fundamental algorithm for three reasons:

• They’re simple to learn.

• They’re easy to use.

• They’re the basis for the most commonly used state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

For the reasons listed above, decision trees are the best place for aspiring data scientists to get started with machine learning.

Simple to learn

Two aspects of decision trees make them simple to learn—they’re intuitive and the mathematics of decision trees is straightforward.

Decision trees are intuitive

Decision trees are relatively simple to learn compared to many machine learning algorithms. First, almost everyone is familiar with decision trees, especially when visually represented: