Tree Pruning

What is Tree Pruning? Tree Pruning Explained

Tree pruning is a technique used to reduce the size of a decision tree by removing unnecessary branches or nodes. The goal of pruning is to improve the tree’s generalization performance and prevent overfitting, where the tree becomes overly complex and captures noise or irrelevant patterns from the training data.

Pruning can be done in two main ways: pre-pruning and post-pruning.

Pre-pruning: Pre-pruning involves stopping the growth of the tree before it reaches its maximum potential size. This is typically done by imposing conditions or constraints during the tree construction process. Common pre-pruning techniques include:

Maximum depth: Limiting the maximum depth of the tree, so it stops growing once it reaches a certain depth level. This helps prevent the tree from becoming too complex and overfitting the training data.

Minimum number of samples: Setting a threshold for the minimum number of samples required to split a node. If a node contains fewer samples than the threshold, it is not split further, and the branch is terminated.

Minimum impurity improvement: Requiring a minimum improvement in a splitting criterion, such as information gain or Gini index, to perform a split. If the improvement is below the threshold, the splitting process is halted.

Post-pruning: Post-pruning involves growing the full decision tree and then selectively removing or collapsing branches or nodes that are deemed unnecessary. This is done by evaluating the performance of the tree on a validation set or using statistical pruning techniques. Common post-pruning techniques include:

Reduced Error Pruning (REP): Starting from the leaves of the tree, each node is replaced with a leaf node if removing it improves the tree’s accuracy on the validation set. This process is iterated recursively until no further improvements can be made.

Cost Complexity Pruning (CCP): Assigning a cost or penalty to each node based on its impurity and the number of samples it covers. The cost complexity parameter is then used to control the trade-off between tree complexity and accuracy. The tree is pruned by removing nodes with higher costs.

Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle: Applying Occam’s razor, the MDL principle aims to find the simplest and most concise tree that best represents the training data. It balances the tree’s complexity and the data’s fit by considering the coding length of the tree and the error of the model.

Pruning techniques help prevent overfitting by reducing the complexity of the decision tree, improving its generalization to unseen data. However, it is important to note that pruning is a trade-off between simplicity and accuracy. Pruning too aggressively can lead to underfitting, where the tree may not capture enough complexity to accurately represent the underlying patterns in the data.

Pruning is commonly used in decision tree-based algorithms, such as CART (Classification and Regression Trees), to optimize model performance and ensure better generalization.