Murphy, P.M. and Pazzani, M.J. (1994)
"Exploring the Decision Forest: An Empirical Investigation of Occam's
Razor in Decision Tree Induction", Volume 1, pages 257-275.
Abstract: We report on a series of experiments in which
all decision trees consistent with the training data are constructed.
These experiments were run to gain an understanding of the properties
of the set of consistent decision trees and the factors that affect
the accuracy of individual trees. In particular, we investigated the
relationship between the size of a decision tree consistent with some
training data and the accuracy of the tree on test data. The
experiments were performed on a massively parallel Maspar computer.
The results of the experiments on several artificial and two real
world problems indicate that, for many of the problems investigated,
smaller consistent decision trees are on average less accurate than
the average accuracy of slightly larger trees.
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