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

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

What is an algorithm?

What is an algorithm?

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

Start my 1-month free trial

What is an algorithm?

“

- [Instructor] We've discussed decision trees in general. We've even discussed how there are several different methods for building them. But now we'll discuss a specific algorithm for building trees. Wikipedia has a good definition of an algorithm. An algorithm is a self-contained step by step set of instructions to be performed. Let's go a level deeper. Starting from an initial state and initial input, the instructions describe a computation that when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing an output and terminating at a final ending state. Now of course in our case that's going to be the tree diagram. If you want to be an advanced user of the decision tree method, you have to understand which algorithm you're using. It's the only way to truly understand what the different menu options mean. Our first algorithm is among the oldest approaches used for building decision trees. Its name is an acronym. Chi-square autoamtic…

Contents