tree classification code available for comparative studies

[Wray Buntine]

I've made the following report available on the Neuroprose Archive
(cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu) as
		buntine.treecode.ps.Z
not because I think connectionists are "deeply" interested in tree learning
research but because I think it would be a handy resource for
comparative studies:
	1)    systems such as CART/C4 are recognised programs
	      for benchmarking supervised learning systems against
	2)    home-grown reimplementations can be buggy and a timesink
	3)    if your problem has some inherent structure and a few
	      key indicator variables then trees may be a good thing to
	      try as well
	4)    trees typically don't work well with purely numeric
	      data or with problems with many variables all giving some
	      minor contribution to the prediction being made

The IND Tree Package we developed here incorporates some of early C4,
most of the classification trees component of CART (no regression) along
with some more recent Bayesian/MDL approaches that sometimes work better.

You can obtain LaTeX source for the following introductory report
if you email to:

	ind at kronos.arc.nasa.gov

and ask for "About the IND Tree Package".

---------------------------------------
	
	About the IND Tree Package
	
	Wray Buntine, RIACS 
        NASA Ames Research Center 
        Mail Stop 269-2 
        Moffet Field, CA 94035 

 	September 29, 1991

   This note introduces the IND Tree Package to prospective procurers and
   those users/installers looking at IND for the first time.
   IND does supervised learning using classification trees.
   IND integrates features from Breiman {\it et al.}'s CART and Quinlan's C4 
   with newer Bayesian and minimum encoding methods for growing classification
   trees, and provides an experimental control suite on top.  The package comes
   with a manual, ``man'' entries, and a guide to tree methods and research.
   Information about obtaining IND, performance statistics,
   documentation, authorship, copyright, installation, etc., are given.
   IND is currently under development, although it has been used considerably
   since late 1989.  IND is implemented in C under UNIX.

----------------------------------------

Wray Buntine
RIACS (Research Inst. for Advanced Comp. Sc.)
NASA Ames Research Center                 phone:  (415) 604 3389
Mail Stop 244-17                          fax:    (415) 604 6997
Moffett Field, CA, 94035 		  email:  wray at ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov