A Study on Split Variable Selection Using Transformation of Variables in Decision Trees

In decision tree analysis, C4.5 and CART algorithm have some problems of computational complexity and bias on variable selection. But QUEST algorithm solves these problems by dividing the step of variable selection and split point selection. When input variables are continuous, QUEST algorithm uses ANOVA F-test under the assumption of normality and homogeneity of variances. In this paper, we investigate the influence of violation of normality assumption and effect of the transformation of variables in the QUEST algorithm. In the simulation study, we obtained the empirical powers of variable selection and the empirical bias of variable selection after transformation of variables having various type of underlying distributions.