<p><div><div><div><div data-width="100" data-show-faces="false" data-send="true" data-layout="button_count" data-height="21" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/interactive-decision-trees-with-microsoft-r/"></div></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
<div>
(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/interactive-decision-trees-with-microsoft-r.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<div>
<p>Even though ensembles of trees (random forests and the like) generally have better predictive power and robustness, fitting a single decision tree to data can often be very useful for:</p>
<ul>
<li>understanding the important variables in a data set</li>
<li>exploring unusual subsegments of the data (and the explanatory variables that define them)</li>
<li>presenting a simple, decision-based model to management to explain behaviors in data</li>
<li>illustrating a model graphically</li>
</ul>
<p>But to get the best out of a decision tree, you need to be able to look at it, interact with it, and able to present it attractively. This <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://longhowlam.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/dont-give-up-on-single-trees-yet-an-interactive-tree-with-microsoft-r/">blog post by Longhow Lam</a> demonstrates the interactive tree viewer in Microsoft R, which lets you explore the individual nodes and breakpoints in the fitted tree, which can be embedded on a web page or printed in a report. Click on the screenshot below (from an analysis of the Titanic survivor data set) to <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://rawgit.com/longhowlam/titanicTree/master/tree.html">try it out</a>.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://rawgit.com/longhowlam/titanicTree/master/tree.html"><img title="Revotreeview" alt="Revotreeview" src="http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/.a/6a010534b1db25970b01b8d248cf08970c-800wi" border="0"></a></p>
<p>You can create interactive trees like this in Microsoft R Client (<a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/#mrc">available free</a>) or Microsoft R Server using the <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/scaler-user-guide-decision-tree">createTreeView</a> function. </p>
<p>For more on the uses and benefits of single trees, check out Longhow Lam's blog post linked below.</p>
<p>Longhow Lam's Blog: <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://longhowlam.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/dont-give-up-on-single-trees-yet-an-interactive-tree-with-microsoft-r/">Don’t give up on single trees yet…. An interactive tree with Microsoft R</a></p>
</div>
<p>
<div>
<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/12/interactive-decision-trees-with-microsoft-r.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>.</div>
<hr>
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers.com</a> offers <strong><a rel="nofollow" href="https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=RBloggers">daily e-mail updates</a></strong> about <a title="The R Project for Statistical Computing" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-project.org/">R</a> news and <a title="R tutorials" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/tutorial">tutorials</a> on topics such as: <a title="Data science" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/data%20science">Data science</a>, <a title="Big Data" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Big%20Data">Big Data, <a title="R jobs" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-users.com/">R jobs</a>, visualization (<a title="ggplot and ggplot2 tutorials" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/ggplot2">ggplot2</a>, <a title="Boxplots using lattice and ggplot2 tutorials" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/boxplot">Boxplots</a>, <a title="Maps and gis" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/map">maps</a>, <a title="Animation in R" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/animation">animation</a>), programming (<a title="RStudio IDE for R" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/RStudio">RStudio</a>, <a title="Sweave and literate programming" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/sweave">Sweave</a>, <a title="LaTeX in R" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/LaTeX">LaTeX</a>, <a title="SQL and databases" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/SQL">SQL</a>, <a title="Eclipse IDE for R" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/eclipse">Eclipse</a>, <a title="git and github, Version Control System" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/git">git</a>, <a title="Large data in R using Hadoop" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/hadoop">hadoop</a>, <a title="Web Scraping of google, facebook, yahoo, twitter and more using R" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Web+Scraping">Web Scraping</a>) statistics (<a title="Regressions and ANOVA analysis tutorials" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/regression">regression</a>, <a title="principal component analysis tutorial" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/PCA">PCA</a>, <a title="Time series" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/time+series">time series</a>, <a title="finance trading" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/trading">trading</a>) and more...
<img height="1" alt="" width="1" src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RBloggers/~4/td58gqaeZe0"></a></div>