Factors Affecting Sunburn

Purpose: to revisit the sunburn example with C4.5 and C4.5rules.

Problem: given the training instances below, use C4.5 and C4.5rules to generate rules to indicate what factor(s) out of the four given attributes, may affect sunburn.

Training Data

Name	Hair	Height	Weight	Lotion	Result
Sarah	blonde	average	light	no	sunburned (positive)
Dana	blonde	tall	average	yes	none (negative)
Alex	brown	short	average	yes	none
Annie	blonde	short	average	no	sunburned
Emily	red	average	heavy	no	sunburned
Pete	brown	tall	heavy	no	none
John	brown	average	heavy	no	none
Katie	blonde	short	light	yes	none

Files for Downloading

• sunburn.names
  • Class, attribute, and value names.
• sunburn.data
  • Training data.
• The resulting decision tree.
  • sunburn.dt: default verbosity level.
• The resulting decision rules.
  • sunburn.r: default verbosity level.

Diagram

Screenshots at the Default Verbosity Level

Preliminaries

sunburn.names

sunburn.data

C4.5 Results

The resulting decision tree.

Here we can see clearly see how errors are encountered in C4.5.

Apparently, 2 out of the 5 instances belonging to the path "if lotion = no, then sunburned" have been misclassified.

Looking at the training data, we may presume that these instances were Pete and John, the only two people to not use lotion and not be sunburned.

Name	Hair	Height	Weight	Lotion	Result
Pete	brown	tall	heavy	no	none
John	brown	average	heavy	no	none

It may come to your attention that both Pete and John have brown hair and are heavyweights. Has C4.5 made an error? Did it overlook the obvious when constructing the decision tree? Shouldn't there be additional attribute tests to correctly classify these two instances?

The answer is no. Keep Occam's Razor in mind and remember that overfitting the data is not desirable. Remember that we are trying to minimize the entropy, not the problems associated with it.

To reduce the number of errors, however, be aware of the fact that an error-prone decision tree is the direct result of supplying C4.5 with error-prone training data.

C4.5rules Results

The resulting decision rules.

Summary

Rule 1 suggests that if "lotion = yes" then the person will not be sunburned.
Otherwise, by default, the person will be sunburned.