From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Decision Trees with SPSS

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What is the Gini coefficient?

What is the Gini coefficient?

From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Decision Trees with SPSS

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What is the Gini coefficient?

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- [Instructor] Classification and Regression Trees was developed in 1984 by Leo Breiman and his colleagues. Implementations of it are widely available in many different software packages, although it's interesting to note that Breiman, himself, collaborated with colleagues at a software company named Salford Systems. They're still around, and they're still making their own implementation of CART, and Breiman worked with them, on their version of CART, until shortly before his death in 2005. If you're intrigued with his work, he's written a very interesting article called The Two Cultures in Statistical Modeling. It compares the kind of work that we're doing in this course, data mining with techniques like decision trees, to more traditional statistics. It's somewhat academic in nature, but it's absolutely worth a read. Fundamental to CART is the idea of impurity, which is closely related to something called the Gini Coefficient. You'll actually see Gini referred to in the menus, for…

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