How Decision Trees Split Nodes, from Loss Function Perspective

Learn how a decision tree splits nodes only to minimize its loss function

Wei Yi
Towards Data Science
12 min readMay 15, 2023

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Photo by Ernest Brillo on Unsplash

When talking about decision tree node splitting, I often hear phrases such as “variance reduction” and “information gain maximization”. And I’m always terrified by them. These are not something I am comfortable with using my every day…

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I am a principal data scientist at AstraZeneca. Previously I worked at SecondMind, Microsoft Research, and also was CTO of a hedge fund EQB.