resubEdge

Class: ClassificationTree

Classification edge by resubstitution

Syntax

edge = resubEdge(tree)


Description

edge = resubEdge(tree) returns the classification edge obtained by tree on its training data.

Input Arguments

tree	A classification tree created using fitctree.

Output Arguments

edge	Classification edge obtained by resubstituting the training data into the calculation of edge.

Examples

Estimate the quality of a classification tree for the Fisher iris data by resubstitution.

load fisheriris
tree = fitctree(meas,species);
redge = resubEdge(tree)

redge =
    0.9384

More About

Edge

The edge is the weighted mean value of the classification margin. The weights are the class probabilities in tree.Prior.

Margin

The classification margin is the difference between the classification score for the true class and maximal classification score for the false classes. Margin is a column vector with the same number of rows as in the matrix X.

Score (tree)

For trees, the score of a classification of a leaf node is the posterior probability of the classification at that node. The posterior probability of the classification at a node is the number of training sequences that lead to that node with the classification, divided by the number of training sequences that lead to that node.

For example, consider classifying a predictor X as true when X < 0.15 or X > 0.95, and X is false otherwise.

Generate 100 random points and classify them:

rng(0,'twister') % for reproducibility
X = rand(100,1);
Y = (abs(X - .55) > .4);
tree = fitctree(X,Y);
view(tree,'Mode','Graph')

Prune the tree:

tree1 = prune(tree,'Level',1);
view(tree1,'Mode','Graph')

The pruned tree correctly classifies observations that are less than 0.15 as true. It also correctly classifies observations from .15 to .94 as false. However, it incorrectly classifies observations that are greater than .94 as false. Therefore, the score for observations that are greater than .15 should be about .05/.85=.06 for true, and about .8/.85=.94 for false.

Compute the prediction scores for the first 10 rows of X:

[~,score] = predict(tree1,X(1:10));
[score X(1:10,:)]

ans = 10×3

    0.9059    0.0941    0.8147
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9058
         0    1.0000    0.1270
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9134
    0.9059    0.0941    0.6324
         0    1.0000    0.0975
    0.9059    0.0941    0.2785
    0.9059    0.0941    0.5469
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9575
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9649

Indeed, every value of X (the right-most column) that is less than 0.15 has associated scores (the left and center columns) of 0 and 1, while the other values of X have associated scores of 0.91 and 0.09. The difference (score 0.09 instead of the expected .06) is due to a statistical fluctuation: there are 8 observations in X in the range (.95,1) instead of the expected 5 observations.