Hi all, I apologies in advance if I am missing something very simple here, but since I failed at resolving this myself, I'm sending this question to the list.
I would appreciate any help in understanding how the rpart function is (exactly) computing the "improve" (which is given in fit$split), and how it differs when using the split='information' vs split='gini' parameters. According to the help in rpart.object: "improve, which is the improvement in deviance given by this split" >From what I understand, that would mean that the "improve" value should not be different when using different "split" switches. Since it is different, then I suspect that it is reflecting the impurity measure somehow, but I can't seem to understand how exactly. Bellow is some simple R code showing the result for a simple classification tree, with what the function outputs, and what I would have expected to see if "improve" were to simply reflect the change in impurity. set.seed(1324) y <- sample(c(0,1), 20, T) x <- y x[1:5] <- 0 require(rpart) fit <- rpart(y~x, method = "class", parms=list(split='information')) fit$split[,3] # why is improve here 6.84 ? fit <- rpart(y~x, method = "class", parms=list(split='gini')) fit$split[,3] # why is improve here 5.38 ? # Here is what I thought it should have been: # for "information" entropy <- function(p) { if(any(p==1)) return(0) # works for the case when y has only 0 and 1 categories... -sum(p*log(p,2)) } gini <- function(p) {sum(p*(1-p))} obs_1 <- y[x>.5] obs_0 <- y[x<.5] n_l <- sum(x>.5) n_R <- sum(x<.5) n <- length(x) # for entropy (information) impurity_root <- entropy(prop.table(table(y))) impurity_l <- entropy(prop.table(table(obs_0))) impurity_R <-entropy(prop.table(table(obs_1))) # shouldn't this have been "improve" ?? impurity_root - ((n_l/n)*impurity_l + (n_R/n)*impurity_R) # 0.7272 # for "gini" impurity_root <- gini(prop.table(table(y))) impurity_l <- gini(prop.table(table(obs_0))) impurity_R <-gini(prop.table(table(obs_1))) impurity_root - ((n_l/n)*impurity_l + (n_R/n)*impurity_R) # 0.3757 Thanks upfront, Tal ----------------Contact Details:------------------------------------------------------- Contact me: tal.gal...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845 Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) | www.r-statistics.com (English) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.