Hybrid decision tree

In this paper, a hybrid learning approach named hybrid decision tree (HDT) is proposed. HDT simulates human reasoning by using symbolic learning to do qualitative analysis and using neural learning to do subsequent quantitative analysis. It generates the trunk of a binary HDT according to the binary information gain ratio criterion in an instance space defined by only original unordered attributes. If unordered attributes cannot further distinguish training examples falling into a leaf node whose diversity is beyond the diversity-threshold, then the node is marked as a dummy node. After all those dummy nodes are marked, a specific feedforward neural network named FANNC that is trained in an instance space defined by only original ordered attributes is exploited to accomplish the learning task, Moreover, this paper distinguishes three kinds of incremental learning tasks. Two incremental learning procedures designed for example-incremental learning with different storage requirements are provided, which enables HDT to deal gracefully with data sets where new data are frequently appended. Also a hypothesis-driven constructive induction mechanism is provided, which enables HDT to generate compact concept descriptions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.