apache/incubator-spark — pull request #515 by manishamde (2014-01-27 07:25:58+00:00)
Title: MLI-1 Decision Trees

Joint work with @hirakendu, @etrain, @atalwalkar and @harsha2010.

Key features:
+ Supports binary classification and regression
+ Supports gini, entropy and variance for information gain calculation
+ Supports both continuous and categorical features

The algorithm has gone through several development iterations over the last few months leading to a highly optimized implementation. Optimizations include:

1. Level-wise training to reduce passes over the entire dataset.
2. Bin-wise split calculation to reduce computation overhead.
3. Aggregation over partitions before combining to reduce communication overhead.

Currently undergoing rigorous functional and performance testing.