Optimizing the C4.5 Decision Tree Algorithm using MSD-Splitting

Abstract

We propose an optimization of Dr. Ross Quinlan's C4.5 decision tree algorithm, used for data mining and classification. We will show that by discretizing and binning a data set's continuous attributes into four groups using our novel technique called MSD-Splitting, we can significantly improve both the algorithm's accuracy and efficiency, especially when applied to large data sets. We applied both the standard C4.5 algorithm and our optimized C4.5 algorithm to two data sets obtained from UC Irvine's Machine Learning Repository: Census Income and Heart Disease. In our initial model, we discretized continuous attributes by splitting them into two groups at the point with the minimum expected information requirement, in accordance with the standard C4.5 algorithm. Using five-fold cross-validation, we calculated the average accuracy of our initial model for each data set. Our initial model yielded a 75.72% average accuracy across both data sets. The average execution time of our initial model was 1,541.57 s for the Census Income data set and 50.54 s for the Heart Disease data set. We then optimized our model by applying MSD-Splitting, which discretizes continuous attributes by splitting them into four groups using the mean and the two values one standard deviation away from the mean as split points. The accuracy of our model improved by an average of 5.11% across both data sets, while the average execution time reduced by an average of 96.72% for the larger Census Income data set and 46.38% for the Heart Disease data set.