Longhow Lam describes the interactive decision tree in Microsoft R Server 9.0:
Despite all the more modern machine learning algorithms, a good old single decision tree can still be useful. Moreover, in a business analytics context they can still keep up in predictive power. In the last few months I have created different predictive response and churn models. I usually just try different learners, logistic regression models, single trees, boosted trees, several neural nets, random forests. In my experience a single decision tree is usually ‘not bad’, often only slightly less predictive power than the more fancy algorithms.
An important thing in analytics is that you can ‘sell‘ your predictive model to the business. A single decision tree is a good way to to do just that, and with an interactive decision tree (created by Microsoft R) this becomes even more easy.
I’d like the labels in Longhow’s tree to be a little clearer, but I do like this from the perspective of giving end users something to experience.