Pattern Trees

This paper proposes a new type of tree termed pattern trees. Like decision trees, pattern trees are an effective tool for classification applications. This paper discusses the difference between decision trees and pattern trees, and also shows that the subsethood based method and the weighted subsethood based method are two specific cases of pattern trees. A novel pattern tree induction method is proposed. The comparison to other classification methods including fuzzy decision tree induction shows that pattern trees can obtain higher accuracy rates in classifications. In addition, pattern trees are capable of generating patterns with good generality, while decision trees can easily fall into the trap of over-fitting.