This is the program for the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Activity Details

CE_26T Wed, 8/4/2010, 8:00 AM - 9:45 AM CC-1 (East)
Introduction to CART: Data Mining with Decision Trees — Continuing Education CTW
ASA , Salford Systems
Instructor(s): Mikhail Golovnya, Salford Systems
This course, intended for the applied statistician wanting to understand and apply the CART methodology for tree-structured nonparametric data analysis, will emphasize on practical data analysis involving classification. All concepts will be illustrated using real-world examples. The course will begin with an intuitive introduction to tree-structured analysis. Working through examples, we will review how to read CART output and set up basic analysis. This session will include performance evaluation of CART trees and cover ways to search for possible improvements of the results. Once a basic working knowledge of CART has been mastered, we will focus on critical details essential for advanced CART applications, including choice of splitting criteria, choosing the best split, using prior probabilities to shape results, refining results with differential misclassification costs, the meaning of cross validation, tree growing, and tree pruning. The course will conclude with discussion of the comparative performance of CART versus other computer-intensive methods, such as artificial neural networks and statistician-generated parametric models.



2010 JSM Online Program Home

For information, contact jsm@amstat.org or phone (888) 231-3473.

If you have questions about the Continuing Education program, please contact the Education Department.