[R] Exhaustive CHAID package

[Achim Zeileis]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, Michael Grant wrote:

> Dear R-Help:
>
> From multiple sources comparing methods of tree classification and tree 
> regressions on various data sets, it seems that Exhaustive CHAID 
> (distinct from CHAID), most commonly generates the most useful tree 
> results and, in particular, is more effective than ctree or rpart which 
> are implemented in R.

I searched a bit on the web for "exhaustive CHAID" and didn't find any 
convincing evidence that this method is "most commonly" the "most useful". 
I doubt that such evidence exists because the methods are applicable to so 
many different situations that uniformly better results are essentially 
never obtained. Nevertheless, if you have references of comparison 
studies, I would still be interested. Possibly these provide insight in 
which situations exhaustive CHAID performs particularly well.

> I see that CHAID, but not Exhaustive CHAID, is in the R-forge, and I 
> write to ask if there are plans to create a package which employs the 
> Exhaustive CHAID strategy.

I wouldn't know of any such plans. But if you want to adapt/extend the 
code from the CHAID package, this is freely available.

> Right now the best source I can find is in SPSS-IBM and I feel a bit 
> disloyal to R using it.

I wouldn't be concerned about disloyalty. If you feel that exhaustive 
CHAID is the most appropriate tool for your problem and you have access to 
it in SPSS, why not use it? Possibly you can also export it from SPSS and 
import it into R using PMML. The "partykit" package has an example with an 
imported QUEST tree from SPSS.

> Michael Grant
> Professor
> University of Colorado Boulder
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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