Machine learning decision tree based on regression in data mining to extract more knowledge

In a data-driven decision-making process, there are various types of data that should be thoroughly processed and analyzed. Data mining is a well-recognized method to obtain such information by analyzing data and transforming it into actionable insights for further use. Among the various data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, and association rules, this research focused on classification techniques and presented an innovative regression-based learning approach in the decision tree (DT) models. DT algorithms are easy-to-understood and can work with different data types including continuous, discrete, and non-numerical. Despite a large number of existing studies, which attempt to enhance the performance of the DT models, there is still a gap in accurately extracting knowledge from databases. In this research, this issue is addressed by exploiting regression and coefficient of determination (R2) methods in a DT. The proposed tree provides new insights in the following aspects: split criterion, handling continuous and discrete variables, labeling leaf node, pruning process by stopping criteria and tree evaluation. The superiority of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using a real-world hospital database and a comparison with existing approaches is provided. The results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods in terms of higher accuracy and lower complexity.