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Decision Tree Regression

In this example, we demonstrate the effect of changing the maximum depth of a decision tree on how it fits to the data. We perform this once on a 1D regression task and once on a multi-output regression task.

# Authors: The scikit-learn developers
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

Decision Tree on a 1D Regression Task

Here we fit a tree on a 1D regression task.

The decision trees is used to fit a sine curve with addition noisy observation. As a result, it learns local linear regressions approximating the sine curve.

We can see that if the maximum depth of the tree (controlled by the max_depth parameter) is set too high, the decision trees learn too fine details of the training data and learn from the noise, i.e. they overfit.

Create a random 1D dataset

import numpy as np

rng = np.random.RandomState(1)
X = np.sort(5 * rng.rand(80, 1), axis=0)
y = np.sin(X).ravel()
y[::5] += 3 * (0.5 - rng.rand(16))

Fit regression model

Here we fit two models with different maximum depths

from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeRegressor

regr_1 = DecisionTreeRegressor(max_depth=2)
regr_2 = DecisionTreeRegressor(max_depth=5)
regr_1.fit(X, y)
regr_2.fit(X, y)

DecisionTreeRegressor(max_depth=5)

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DecisionTreeRegressor

?Documentation for DecisionTreeRegressoriFitted

Parameters

	max_depth max_depth: int, default=None The maximum depth of the tree. If None, then nodes are expanded until all leaves are pure or until all leaves contain less than min_samples_split samples. For an example of how ``max_depth`` influences the model, see :ref:`sphx_glr_auto_examples_tree_plot_tree_regression.py`.	5
	criterion criterion: {"squared_error", "absolute_error", "poisson"}, default="squared_error" The function to measure the quality of a split. Supported criteria are "squared_error" for the mean squared error, which is equal to variance reduction as feature selection criterion and minimizes the L2 loss using the mean of each terminal node, "absolute_error" for the mean absolute error, which minimizes the L1 loss using the median of each terminal node, and "poisson" which uses reduction in Poisson deviance to find splits, also using the mean of each terminal node. .. versionadded:: 0.18 Mean Absolute Error (MAE) criterion. .. versionadded:: 0.24 Poisson deviance criterion. .. versionchanged:: 1.9 Criterion `"friedman_mse"` was deprecated.	'squared_error'
	splitter splitter: {"best", "random"}, default="best" The strategy used to choose the split at each node. Supported strategies are "best" to choose the best split and "random" to choose the best random split.	'best'
	min_samples_split min_samples_split: int or float, default=2 The minimum number of samples required to split an internal node: - If int, then consider `min_samples_split` as the minimum number. - If float, then `min_samples_split` is a fraction and `ceil(min_samples_split * n_samples)` are the minimum number of samples for each split. .. versionchanged:: 0.18 Added float values for fractions.	2
	min_samples_leaf min_samples_leaf: int or float, default=1 The minimum number of samples required to be at a leaf node. A split point at any depth will only be considered if it leaves at least ``min_samples_leaf`` training samples in each of the left and right branches. This may have the effect of smoothing the model, especially in regression. - If int, then consider `min_samples_leaf` as the minimum number. - If float, then `min_samples_leaf` is a fraction and `ceil(min_samples_leaf * n_samples)` are the minimum number of samples for each node. .. versionchanged:: 0.18 Added float values for fractions.	1
	min_weight_fraction_leaf min_weight_fraction_leaf: float, default=0.0 The minimum weighted fraction of the sum total of weights (of all the input samples) required to be at a leaf node. Samples have equal weight when sample_weight is not provided.	0.0
	max_features max_features: int, float or {"sqrt", "log2"}, default=None The number of features to consider when looking for the best split: - If int, then consider `max_features` features at each split. - If float, then `max_features` is a fraction and `max(1, int(max_features * n_features_in_))` features are considered at each split. - If "sqrt", then `max_features=sqrt(n_features)`. - If "log2", then `max_features=log2(n_features)`. - If None, then `max_features=n_features`. Note: the search for a split does not stop until at least one valid partition of the node samples is found, even if it requires to effectively inspect more than ``max_features`` features.	None
	random_state random_state: int, RandomState instance or None, default=None Controls the randomness of the estimator. The features are always randomly permuted at each split, even if ``splitter`` is set to ``"best"``. When ``max_features < n_features``, the algorithm will select ``max_features`` at random at each split before finding the best split among them. But the best found split may vary across different runs, even if ``max_features=n_features``. That is the case, if the improvement of the criterion is identical for several splits and one split has to be selected at random. To obtain a deterministic behaviour during fitting, ``random_state`` has to be fixed to an integer. See :term:`Glossary <random_state>` for details.	None
	max_leaf_nodes max_leaf_nodes: int, default=None Grow a tree with ``max_leaf_nodes`` in best-first fashion. Best nodes are defined as relative reduction in impurity. If None then unlimited number of leaf nodes.	None
	min_impurity_decrease min_impurity_decrease: float, default=0.0 A node will be split if this split induces a decrease of the impurity greater than or equal to this value. The weighted impurity decrease equation is the following:: N_t / N * (impurity - N_t_R / N_t * right_impurity - N_t_L / N_t * left_impurity) where ``N`` is the total number of samples, ``N_t`` is the number of samples at the current node, ``N_t_L`` is the number of samples in the left child, and ``N_t_R`` is the number of samples in the right child. ``N``, ``N_t``, ``N_t_R`` and ``N_t_L`` all refer to the weighted sum, if ``sample_weight`` is passed. .. versionadded:: 0.19	0.0
	ccp_alpha ccp_alpha: non-negative float, default=0.0 Complexity parameter used for Minimal Cost-Complexity Pruning. The subtree with the largest cost complexity that is smaller than ``ccp_alpha`` will be chosen. By default, no pruning is performed. See :ref:`minimal_cost_complexity_pruning` for details. See :ref:`sphx_glr_auto_examples_tree_plot_cost_complexity_pruning.py` for an example of such pruning. .. versionadded:: 0.22	0.0
	monotonic_cst monotonic_cst: array-like of int of shape (n_features), default=None Indicates the monotonicity constraint to enforce on each feature. - 1: monotonic increase - 0: no constraint - -1: monotonic decrease If monotonic_cst is None, no constraints are applied. Monotonicity constraints are not supported for: - multioutput regressions (i.e. when `n_outputs_ > 1`). Read more in the :ref:`User Guide <monotonic_cst_gbdt>`. .. versionadded:: 1.4	None

Fitted attributes

Name	Type	Value
feature_importances_ feature_importances_: ndarray of shape (n_features,) The feature importances. The higher, the more important the feature. The importance of a feature is computed as the (normalized) total reduction of the criterion brought by that feature. It is also known as the Gini importance [4]_. Warning: impurity-based feature importances can be misleading for high cardinality features (many unique values). See :func:`sklearn.inspection.permutation_importance` as an alternative.	ndarray[float64](1,)	[1.]
max_features_ max_features_: int The inferred value of max_features.	int	1
n_features_in_ n_features_in_: int Number of features seen during :term:`fit`. .. versionadded:: 0.24	int	1
n_outputs_ n_outputs_: int The number of outputs when ``fit`` is performed.	int	1
tree_ tree_: Tree instance The underlying Tree object. Please refer to ``help(sklearn.tree._tree.Tree)`` for attributes of Tree object and :ref:`sphx_glr_auto_examples_tree_plot_unveil_tree_structure.py` for basic usage of these attributes.	Tree	<sklearn.tree...x784129e47280>

Predict

Get predictions on the test set

X_test = np.arange(0.0, 5.0, 0.01)[:, np.newaxis]
y_1 = regr_1.predict(X_test)
y_2 = regr_2.predict(X_test)

Plot the results

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure()
plt.scatter(X, y, s=20, edgecolor="black", c="darkorange", label="data")
plt.plot(X_test, y_1, color="cornflowerblue", label="max_depth=2", linewidth=2)
plt.plot(X_test, y_2, color="yellowgreen", label="max_depth=5", linewidth=2)
plt.xlabel("data")
plt.ylabel("target")
plt.title("Decision Tree Regression")
plt.legend()
plt.show()

As you can see, the model with a depth of 5 (yellow) learns the details of the training data to the point that it overfits to the noise. On the other hand, the model with a depth of 2 (blue) learns the major tendencies in the data well and does not overfit. In real use cases, you need to make sure that the tree is not overfitting the training data, which can be done using cross-validation.