Recently, I’ve been requested by non-data-mining colleagues to explain how Classification and Regression Trees work. While a detailed explanation with examples exists in my co-authored textbook Data Mining for Business Intelligence, I found that the following explanation worked well with people who are familiar with Excel’s Pivot Tables: Classification tree for predicting vulnerability to famine Suppose the goal is to generate predictions for some variable, numerical or categorical, given a set of predictors. The idea behind trees is to create groups of records with similar profiles in terms of their predictors, and then average the outcome variable of interest to … Continue reading Trees in pivot table terminology