A performance comparison of trained multilayer perceptrons and trained classification trees

Multilayer perceptrons and trained classification trees are two very different techniques which have recently become popular. Giving enough data and time, both methods are capable of performing arbitrary nonlinear classification. The two techniques have not previously been compared on real-world problems. The authors first consider the important differences between multilayer perceptrons and classification trees and conclude that there is not enough theoretical basis for the clear-cut superiority of one technique over the other. They then present results of a number of empirical tests on quite different problems in power system load forecasting and speaker-independent vowel identification. They compare the performance for classification and prediction in terms of accuracy outside the training set. In all cases, even with various sizes of training sets, the multilayer perceptron performed as well as or better than the trained classification trees. The authors are confident that the univariate version of the trained classification trees do not perform as well as the multilayer perceptron. More studies are needed, however, on the comparative performance of the linear combination version of the classification trees