A Distributed Decision Tree Algorithm and Its Implementation on Big Data Platforms

Decision tree algorithms are very popular in the field of data mining. This paper proposes a distributed decision tree algorithm and shows examples of its implementation on big data platforms. The major contribution of this paper is the novel KS-Tree algorithm which builds a decision tree in a distributed environment. KS-Tree is applied to some real world data mining problems and compared with state-of-the-art decision tree techniques that are implemented in R and Apache Spark. The results show that KS-Tree can achieve better results, especially with large data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that KS-Tree can be applied to various data mining tasks, such as variable selection.