What is a Regression Tree?

Among the lesser known and less common types of models is called a Regression Tree. A Regression Tree is actaully misnomer since it does not in fact use Regression at all when being built but instead uses something called the Standard Deviation Reduction. We’ll define that in a moment because even though all this is important, the ideas of this model is built around a Decision Tree - which requires us to step back even more.

What is a Decision Tree?

A Decision Tree is usually discussed as a sort of flow chart based on the test data being split on a set of features. Then, there is a calculation made - usually Entropy - to see which split generates a better model. Once the split has been made then you get two subtrees which further tries the same thing until the model is built. A very simple pretend example is:

flowchart TB
  Income[ If Income >50K]
  Savings[Has Savings]
  NoSavings[No Savings]

  Income ==>|True|Savings
  Income ==>|False|NoSavings

The trees are usually much larger - as we’ll see in a moment. There is also a solid amount of customization which goes into a good Decision Tree - but that is not what we’re intending to work with today. Today, we’re going to look at how to make them in R and Python.

Regression Trees in R

So, we’ll be borrowing data from a wonderful book called Machine Learning In R by Brett Lantz which is an excellent read and reference. I strongly recommend his work since the videos and texts written by him do an excellent job of explaining these concepts. Anyways, first we get the data.

# You will need these libraries:
# install.packages(c('rpart', 'rsample', 'rpart.plot'))
library(tidyverse)

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
✔ ggplot2   3.5.2     ✔ tibble    3.3.0
✔ lubridate 1.9.4     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
✔ purrr     1.1.0     
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

wines = read_csv("https://github.com/stedy/Machine-Learning-with-R-datasets/raw/master/whitewines.csv");

Rows: 4898 Columns: 12
── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Delimiter: ","
dbl (12): fixed acidity, volatile acidity, citric acid, residual sugar, chlo...

ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

Once again, make sure that if you’re following along that you get those packages installed. This dataset is about judging wine and - as someone who does not drink - we’ll leave the judging to the judge data here.

One point I would like to comment on since I’ll be borrowing from the tidyverse here is that if you’re still doing manual training/testing splits then I recommend the rsample package. With this, you can split the model and access each in part using the functions testing() and training() to pull them out of the object. This means you wont have to manage them separatly which is a nice to have:

library(rpart)
library(rpart.plot)
library(rsample)

splits = initial_split(wines, prop = .8)

Once we’ve got our split, then we can simply use the formula notation on our training data and check out the model:

model = rpart(quality ~ ., training(splits))
model

n= 3918 

node), split, n, deviance, yval
      * denotes terminal node

 1) root 3918 3087.9930 5.882593  
   2) alcohol< 10.85 2453 1482.3080 5.612311  
     4) volatile acidity>=0.2525 1278  617.5814 5.357590 *
     5) volatile acidity< 0.2525 1175  691.6170 5.889362  
      10) volatile acidity>=0.2075 585  302.6906 5.724786 *
      11) volatile acidity< 0.2075 590  357.3712 6.052542  
        22) residual sugar< 10.15 423  221.4043 5.907801 *
        23) residual sugar>=10.15 167  104.6587 6.419162 *
   3) alcohol>=10.85 1465 1126.4400 6.335154  
     6) free sulfur dioxide< 11.5 94  104.9787 5.425532 *
     7) free sulfur dioxide>=11.5 1371  938.3516 6.397520  
      14) alcohol< 11.85 725  464.0000 6.200000 *
      15) alcohol>=11.85 646  414.3220 6.619195 *

The final results of the splits are marked with an * symbol and tell us which path gets us to the best rated quality wine. If you’re finding this a bit annoying to interpret then do not worry because there is a better way to represent these. These kinds of models are excellent when plotted so we’ll do that instead:

rpart.plot(model, digits=3, fallen.leaves = T)

There you go, the splits which end up with the best quality wines are alcohol > 11.88 and free sulfur dioxide > 11.5 for whatever that means. I hope someone reading this knows more about wine then I do and can interpret those values.

Regression Trees in Python

Doing this in Python is a little different but we’ll be back to using the scikit-learn package as it contains the models we’ll be after. The class is the DecisionTreeRegressor under sklearn.tree:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeRegressor

data = pd.read_csv("https://github.com/stedy/Machine-Learning-with-R-datasets/raw/master/whitewines.csv")

y = data.quality
X = data.drop('quality', axis=1)
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.8, random_state=421)

model = DecisionTreeRegressor(random_state=421, max_depth=5)
model.fit(X_train, y_train);

I set the max_depth lower to attempt to match the R version’s tree. If we try to plot the tree without then it is almost impossible to reason about. You can see this when we plot it using plot_tree from sklearn.tree:

from sklearn.tree import plot_tree, export_text

bigTree = DecisionTreeRegressor(random_state=421)
bigTree.fit(X_train, y_train);

plot_tree(bigTree)

I know what I’m looking for and I cannot make out anything of value from this tree. This is better but the text is still mostly illegible:

plot_tree(model)

Thoughts

I find the python outputs to be frankily useless. Trying to fix the DPI and display is just not working in getting any meaning out of these so I definitely recommend R if you’re planning on using these models. They’re a bit niche and you’ll have to have purely numeric data but there are plenty of problems in the real world where that is the case. These would be a solid baseline model to start with and then try to find models which improve on it.

Also, an interesting difference between the Python version and the R version is the metrics are not the same. The R version uses something called Standard Deviation Reduction which tries to condition the split on minimizing the Standard Deviation. But, the Python documentation doesn’t even have that as a choice but defaults to squared error instead.