How do I find which attributes my tree splits on, when using scikit-learn?

Question

I have been exploring scikit-learn, making decision trees with both entropy and gini splitting criteria, and exploring the differences.

My question, is how can I \"o

Answer 1

If you just want a quick look at which what is going on in the tree, try:

zip(X.columns[clf.tree_.feature], clf.tree_.threshold, clf.tree_.children_left, clf.tree_.children_right)

where X is the data frame of independent variables and clf is the decision tree object. Notice that clf.tree_.children_left and clf.tree_.children_right together contain the order that the splits were made (each one of these would correspond to an arrow in the graphviz visualization).

Answer 2

Scikit learn introduced a delicious new method called export_text in version 0.21 (May 2019) to view all the rules from a tree. Documentation here.

Once you've fit your model, you just need two lines of code. First, import export_text:

from sklearn.tree.export import export_text

Second, create an object that will contain your rules. To make the rules look more readable, use the feature_names argument and pass a list of your feature names. For example, if your model is called model and your features are named in a dataframe called X_train, you could create an object called tree_rules:

tree_rules = export_text(model, feature_names=list(X_train))

Then just print or save tree_rules. Your output will look like this:

|--- Age <= 0.63
|   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.61
|   |   |--- Age <= -0.16
|   |   |   |--- class: 0
|   |   |--- Age >  -0.16
|   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= -0.06
|   |   |   |   |--- class: 0
|   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary >  -0.06
|   |   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.40
|   |   |   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.03
|   |   |   |   |   |   |--- class: 1

Answer 3

Directly from the documentation ( http://scikit-learn.org/0.12/modules/tree.html ):

from io import StringIO
out = StringIO()
out = tree.export_graphviz(clf, out_file=out)

StringIO module is no longer supported in Python3, instead import io module.

There is also the tree_ attribute in your decision tree object, which allows the direct access to the whole structure.

And you can simply read it

clf.tree_.children_left #array of left children
clf.tree_.children_right #array of right children
clf.tree_.feature #array of nodes splitting feature
clf.tree_.threshold #array of nodes splitting points
clf.tree_.value #array of nodes values

for more details look at the source code of export method

In general you can use the inspect module

from inspect import getmembers
print( getmembers( clf.tree_ ) )

to get all the object's elements