Influence of Explanatory Variable Distributions on the Behavior of the Impurity Measures Used in Classification Tree Learning

The primary objective of our study is to analyze how the nature of explanatory variables influences the values and behavior of impurity measures, including the Shannon, Rényi, Tsallis, Sharma-Mittal, Sharma-Taneja, and Kapur entropies. Our analysis aims to use these measures in the interactive learning of decision trees, particularly in the tie-breaking situations where an expert needs to make a decision. We simulate the values of explanatory variables from various probability distributions in order to consider a wide range of variability and properties. These probability distributions include the normal, Cauchy, uniform, exponential, and two beta distributions. This research assumes that the values of the binary responses are generated from the logistic regression model. All of the six mentioned probability distributions of the explanatory variables are presented in the same graphical format. The first two graphs depict histograms of the explanatory variables values and their corresponding probabilities generated by a particular model. The remaining graphs present distinct impurity measures with different parameters. In order to examine and discuss the behavior of the obtained results, we conduct a sensitivity analysis of the algorithms with regard to the entropy parameter values. We also demonstrate how certain explanatory variables affect the process of interactive tree learning.