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I am learning my way through this, so please be easy on me if you find any mistakes, I could really use a professional opinion here. Thx.

I am trying to model a Decision Tree Classifier as part of an ensemble (soft voting system). The problem is that I have the categorical features already converted to Integer values (i.e. if blood pressure is within the medium range, then blood pressure =2 in the dataset).

The categories for the feature variables are as follows

feature#1 (total cholesterol) = 1, 2, 3

feature#2 (Systolic Blood Pressure) = 1, 2, 3

feature#3 (diastolic Blood Pressure) = 1, 2, 3

feature#4 (smoking rate) = 1, 2, 3

The target/class variable (stroke) = 1, 2 (yes and no, respectively).

The problem is that when I draw the DT (please check the picture), I expect to get a splitting decision where a certain feature equals one of the above-mentioned values (i.e. 1, 2, 3). However, it is giving me other values like 1.5, 0.5, etc.,

I have included the code and a sample dataset for anyone who can help me out. btw, I need to keep the current dataset in the number format as I am using it in conjunction with other classifiers for the soft voting classifier.

Here is the dataset and this is the code for reference, I am using Spyder with Python 3.7 enter image description here

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Its all ok.

Exactly because your values are between 1 and 2 does he chooses 1.5. In other words trees will select 1 and 2 as values (integers not real numbers) but 1.5 is there as cut-off point between these classes.

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    $\begingroup$ thx for the reply, Please note that the X[1] refers to the second feature variable, not the class variable, the class(target) is labeled with Y and it is hidden here as the slit is done according to the values of the features. I think this will stay the same even if I change the range of the classes to be 0,1 instead of 1,2 . Will try though and see. $\endgroup$ – a_new_moody Dec 22 '19 at 19:14
  • $\begingroup$ I know, you wont see Y in this tree in any case $\endgroup$ – Noah Weber Dec 22 '19 at 19:17
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    $\begingroup$ So u mean that it is working? and I have no problem at all? $\endgroup$ – a_new_moody Dec 22 '19 at 19:20
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, that's what I meant $\endgroup$ – Noah Weber Dec 22 '19 at 20:11
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You don't need to do anything with input variables and convert the output to one hot encoded.

Atleast don't do ordinal encoding for the output.

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  • $\begingroup$ But shouldn't I use ordinal encoding for categorical features? $\endgroup$ – a_new_moody Jan 6 '20 at 8:11

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