Construction of Decision Trees and Acyclic Decision Graphs from Decision Rule Systems

Abstract

Decision trees and systems of decision rules are widely used as classifiers, as a means for knowledge representation, and as algorithms. They are among the most interpretable models for data analysis. The study of the relationships between these two models can be seen as an important task of computer science. Methods for transforming decision trees into systems of decision rules are simple and well-known. In this paper, we consider the inverse transformation problem, which is not trivial. We study the complexity of constructing decision trees and acyclic decision graphs representing decision trees from decision rule systems, and we discuss the possibility of not building the entire decision tree, but describing the computation path in this tree for the given input.