A fast decision tree learning algorithm

Abstract

There is growing interest in scaling up the widely-used decision-tree learning algorithms to very large data sets. Although numerous diverse techniques have been proposed, a fast tree-growing algorithm without substantial decrease in accuracy and substantial increase in space complexity is essential. In this paper, we present a novel, fast decision-tree learning algorithm that is based on a conditional independence assumption. The new algorithm has a time complexity of O(m · n), where m is the size of the training data and n is the number of attributes. This is a significant asymptotic improvement over the time complexity O(m · n 2) of the standard decision-tree learning algorithm C4.5, with an additional space increase of only O(n). Experiments