# Decision trees

A popular family of classification and regression methods. More information about the spark.ml implementation can be found further in the section on decision trees.

### Examples

The following examples load a dataset in LibSVM format, split it into training and test sets, train on the first dataset, and then evaluate on the held-out test set. We use two feature transformers to prepare the data; these help index categories for the label and categorical features, adding metadata to the DataFrame which the Decision Tree algorithm can recognize..

```
import org.apache.spark.ml.Pipeline
import org.apache.spark.ml.classification.DecisionTreeClassificationModel
import org.apache.spark.ml.classification.DecisionTreeClassifier
import org.apache.spark.ml.evaluation.MulticlassClassificationEvaluator
import org.apache.spark.ml.feature.{IndexToString, StringIndexer, VectorIndexer}

// Load the data stored in LIBSVM format as a DataFrame.
val data = spark.read.format("libsvm").load("file:///opt/spark/data/mllib/sample_libsvm_data.txt")

// Index labels, adding metadata to the label column.
// Fit on whole dataset to include all labels in index.
val labelIndexer = new StringIndexer()
  .setInputCol("label")
  .setOutputCol("indexedLabel")
  .fit(data)
// Automatically identify categorical features, and index them.
val featureIndexer = new VectorIndexer()
  .setInputCol("features")
  .setOutputCol("indexedFeatures")
  .setMaxCategories(4) // features with > 4 distinct values are treated as continuous.
  .fit(data)

// Split the data into training and test sets (30% held out for testing).
val Array(trainingData, testData) = data.randomSplit(Array(0.7, 0.3))

// Train a DecisionTree model.
val dt = new DecisionTreeClassifier()
  .setLabelCol("indexedLabel")
  .setFeaturesCol("indexedFeatures")

// Convert indexed labels back to original labels.
val labelConverter = new IndexToString()
  .setInputCol("prediction")
  .setOutputCol("predictedLabel")
  .setLabels(labelIndexer.labels)

// Chain indexers and tree in a Pipeline.
val pipeline = new Pipeline()
  .setStages(Array(labelIndexer, featureIndexer, dt, labelConverter))

// Train model. This also runs the indexers.
val model = pipeline.fit(trainingData)

// Make predictions.
val predictions = model.transform(testData)

// Select example rows to display.
predictions.select("predictedLabel", "label", "features").show(5)

// Select (prediction, true label) and compute test error.
val evaluator = new MulticlassClassificationEvaluator()
  .setLabelCol("indexedLabel")
  .setPredictionCol("prediction")
  .setMetricName("accuracy")
val accuracy = evaluator.evaluate(predictions)
println(s"Test Error = ${(1.0 - accuracy)}")

val treeModel = model.stages(2).asInstanceOf[DecisionTreeClassificationModel]
println(s"Learned classification tree model:\n ${treeModel.toDebugString}")

/*
Output:
+--------------+-----+--------------------+
|predictedLabel|label|            features|
+--------------+-----+--------------------+
|           0.0|  0.0|(692,[121,122,123...|
|           0.0|  0.0|(692,[123,124,125...|
|           0.0|  0.0|(692,[124,125,126...|
|           0.0|  0.0|(692,[124,125,126...|
|           0.0|  0.0|(692,[125,126,127...|
+--------------+-----+--------------------+
only showing top 5 rows

Test Error = 0.030303030303030276
Learned classification tree model:
 DecisionTreeClassificationModel (uid=dtc_a286075ebc4c) of depth 2 with 5 nodes
  If (feature 406 <= 22.0)
   If (feature 99 in {2.0})
    Predict: 0.0
   Else (feature 99 not in {2.0})
    Predict: 1.0
  Else (feature 406 > 22.0)
   Predict: 0.0


*/
```
