Quote of the Week, June 20, 2007
These quotes are in the opposite spirit of the last two Bayesian quotes.
They are from the excellent “R”-based , Tutorial on Non-Parametrics given by
Chad Schafer and Larry Wassserman at the 2006 SAMSI Special Semester on AstroStatistics (or here ).
Chad and Larry were explaining trees:
For more sophistcated tree-searches, you might try Robert Nowak [and his former student, Becca Willett --- especially her "software" pages]. There is even Bayesian CART — Classifcation And Regression Trees. These can take 8 or 9 hours to “do it right”, via MCMC. BUT [these results] tend to be very close to [less rigorous] methods that take only minutes.
Trees are used primarily by doctors, for patients: it is much easier to follow a tree than a kernel estimator, in person.
Trees are much more ad-hoc than other methods we talked about, BUT they are very user friendly, very flexible.
In machine learning, which is only statistics done by computer scientists, they love trees.
hlee:
To my knowledge, CART is a creation of Leo Breiman, late probabilist and professor of statistics. He grew not only a single tree but (random) forests. Surprisingly, trees attracted computer scientists more than statisticians. Search for “Leo Breiman” in the AstroStat Slog or http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/?s=leo+breiman for more information
06-20-2007, 7:16 pm