Construction of tree structured classifiers by the MDL principle

An approach to the problem of constructing tree structured classifiers that is based on Rissanen´s (1983) minimum description length (MDL) principle is presented. Simple and efficient rules for sequential growing and pruning of the tree are derived using this approach. The two rules are derived from a single MDL-based criterion. These splitting and pruning rules are intuitively pleasing and computationally simple. The computational load of the pruning rule is substantially smaller than the alternative pruning schemes of A. Mabbet et al. (1980) and L. Breiman et al. (1984). The extension of these splitting and pruning criteria to the case of multiple classes is straightforward. Experimental results illustrating the performance of this technique in automatic character recognition are provided