To date I have not been fully satisfied with how my decision trees have appeared. They did not appear to use space efficiently and they were not as easy to read as I would have liked. Today we will make some improvements to a Graphviz recipe for constructing decision trees. These improvements will make for a more space efficient decision tree that is also easier to read.

The main improvements I have made are:

• All of the labelling for actions and events appears on the edges instead of the nodes. In previous examples, most labelling was done at the nodes.
• There is no labelling at all between actions and events, just a small connector shape.

The combination of these two improvements means that 1) it is easier to read the graph as all the edges are labelled and the flow is oriented in a left-to-right fashion, and 2) the layout is more space efficient as the nodes connecting actions to events takes up alot of space when they include labelling. Now, we have only small connector shapes with no labelling.

I'll illustrate the improved decision tree in the context of a decision about how much nitrogen to apply to a crop per acre that involves calculating the payoffs you might expect if you get Good, Average, or Poor weather during the growing season. This is what such a decision tree looks like with the improvements mentioned above:

There are a couple of other aspects of this decision tree that are also noteworthy. First, the labels for each possible action (e.g., Nitrogen application amounts) includes the cost per acre of applying that amount of Nitrogen. One aspect of constructing a decision tree is computing the cost for each course of action. The second aspect to note is that the terminal nodes on our decision tree are often payoffs that involve multiplying an estimate of revenue by the probability of some event that significantly affects the payoff (e.g., the quality of the weather during the growing season).

I created the visualization for the nitrogen application decision using Graphviz. To do so I piped the recipe below into the graphviz program "dot". The recipe illustrates how to add comments to your dot file to make it easy to follow your recipe for rendering a graph shape. The recipe is also organized into logical sections to also make it easier to read.

Figuring out how to render decision trees with labelled intermediate edges instead of labelled intermediate nodes was a big step in creating a decision tree format that I find is more workable. I'm not done yet, however, as I want to explore some other features of graphviz to add some more tweaks to my decision tree.