Bias-variance tradeoff of soft decision trees

peer reviewedThis paper focuses on the study of the error composition of a fuzzy decision tree induction method recently proposed by the authors, called soft decision trees. This error may be expressed as a sum of three types of error: residual error, bias and variance. The paper studies empirically the tradeoff between bias and variance in a soft decision tree method and compares it with the tradeoff of classical crisp regression and classification trees. The main conclusion is that the reduced prediction variance of fuzzy trees is the main reason for their improved performance with respect to crisp ones