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Re: Regression Trees- Independent Variable Collinearity

To: "'Prof Brian D Ripley'" <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>, "Wing, Michael" <Michael.Wing@orst.edu>
Subject: Re: Regression Trees- Independent Variable Collinearity
From: "Gunter, Bert" <bert_gunter@merck.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 08:13:08 -0400
Cc: s-news@wubios.wustl.edu
More than "not at all", I'd say: Decidedly ambiguous. The tree topologies
(though not necessarily the predictions) can change radically with minor
alterations to the data.

Bert Gunter
Biometrics Research RY 70-38
Merck & Company
P.O. Box 2000
Rahway, NJ 07065-0900
Phone: (732) 594-7765
mailto: bert_gunter@merck.com

"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."      -- George E.P. Box


-----Original Message-----
From: Prof Brian D Ripley [mailto:ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 1:48 AM
To: Wing, Michael
Cc: s-news@wubios.wustl.edu
Subject: Re: [S] Regression Trees- Independent Variable Collinearity


On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Wing, Michael wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> To what extent are regression tree (with a single continuous dependent
> variable) results robust in regards to collinearity or correlation between
> independent variables?  I'm interested in this issue when both continuous
> and factor variables are included in the independent variables and also
when
> only continuous independent variables are used.

Not at all.  Tree-based methods are not robust to many things, which is
why methods such as bagging and boosting have arisen.  They were designed
to find fairly complex but clear-cut relationships.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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