To predict which drug might be appropriate for a future patient with particular type of illness using Decision Trees.
Imagine that there is a medical researcher compiling data for a study. He has collected data about a set of patients, all of whom suffered from the same illness. During their course of treatment, each patient responded to one of 5 medications, Drug A, Drug B, Drug c, Drug x and y.
Part of the job is to build a model to find out which drug might be appropriate for a future patient with the same illness. The features of this dataset are Age, Sex, Blood Pressure, and the Cholesterol of the patients, and the target is the drug that each patient responded to.
It is a sample of multiclass classifier, and we can use the training part of the dataset to build a decision tree, and then use it to predict the class of an unknown patient, or to prescribe a drug to a new patient.
Decision tree is one of the predictive modelling approaches used in statistics, data mining and machine learning.
Decision trees are constructed via an algorithmic approach that identifies ways to split a data set based on different conditions. It is one of the most widely used and practical methods for supervised learning. Decision Trees are a non-parametric supervised learning method used for both classification and regression tasks.
Tree models where the target variable can take a discrete set of values are called classification trees. Decision trees where the target variable can take continuous values (typically real numbers) are called regression trees. Classification And Regression Tree (CART) is general term for this.
