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prune

Produce sequence of regression subtrees by pruning regression tree

Description

tree1 = prune(tree) returns a copy of the regression tree tree that includes its optimal pruning sequence.

example

___ = prune(tree,Alpha=alpha) specifies to prune tree to the pruning cost alpha.

example

___ = prune(tree,Level=level) specifies to prune tree to a level level.

example

___ = prune(tree,Nodes=nodes) specifies to turn the branch nodes listed in nodes into leaf nodes in tree.

Examples

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Load the carsmall data set. Consider Horsepower and Weight as predictor variables.

load carsmall;
X = [Weight Horsepower];
varNames = ["Weight" "Horsepower"];

Grow a regression tree using the entire data set. View the tree.

Mdl = fitrtree(X,MPG,PredictorNames=varNames)
Mdl = 
  RegressionTree
           PredictorNames: {'Weight'  'Horsepower'}
             ResponseName: 'Y'
    CategoricalPredictors: []
        ResponseTransform: 'none'
          NumObservations: 94


view(Mdl,Mode="graph");

The regression tree has 16 pruning levels.

Prune the regression tree to pruning-level 10. View the pruned tree.

MdlPruned = prune(Mdl,Level=10);
view(MdlPruned,Mode="graph");

The pruned tree has six pruning levels.

Input Arguments

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Regression tree model, specified as a RegressionTree model object trained with fitrtree.

Pruning cost, specified as a numeric scalar from 0 (no pruning) to 1 (prune to one node). The prune function prunes the tree to minimize the sum of (Alpha times the number of leaf nodes) and a cost (mean squared error).

Pruning level, specified as a numeric scalar from 0 (no pruning) to the largest pruning level of this tree max(tree.PruneList). The prune function returns the tree pruned to this level.

Branch nodes to turn into leaf nodes, specified as a numeric vector with elements from 1 to tree.NumNodes. Any tree branch nodes listed in Nodes become leaf nodes in tree1, unless their parent nodes are also pruned.

Output Arguments

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Updated version of tree, returned as a RegressionTree model object.

When you specify any name-value arguments for prune, tree1 is a pruned tree created from tree using the optimal pruning sequence.

If you do not specify any name-value arguments for prune, tree1 is the full, unpruned tree, but with optimal pruning information added. This information is useful if you create tree by pruning another tree, or by using the fitrtree function with Prune="off",MergeLeaves="off". If you plan to prune a tree multiple times using the optimal pruning sequence, specify Prune="on" when you create tree with fitrtree.

Extended Capabilities

Version History

Introduced in R2011a