Earticle

This article introduces a unified method of choosing the most explanatory and significant multiway partitions for classification tree design and analysis. The method is derived on the impurity reduction (IR) measure of divergence, which is proposed to extend the proportional-reduction-in-error (PRE) measure in the decision-theory context. For the method derivation, the IR measure is analyzed to characterize its statistical properties which are used to consistently handle the subjects of feature formation, feature selection, and feature deletion required in the associated classification tree construction. A numerical example is considered to illustrate the proposed approach.