How to extract the decision rules from scikit-lear

Question

Can I extract the underlying decision-rules (or 'decision paths') from a trained tree in a decision tree as a textual list?

Something like:

if A>0.4 then if B<0.2 then if C>0.8 then class='X'

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Apparently a long time ago somebody already decided to try to add the following function to the official scikit's tree export functions (which basically only supports export_graphviz)

def export_dict(tree, feature_names=None, max_depth=None) :
    """Export a decision tree in dict format.

Here is his full commit:

https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/79bdc8f711d0af225ed6be9fdb708cea9f98a910/sklearn/tree/export.py

Not exactly sure what happened to this comment. But you could also try to use that function.

I think this warrants a serious documentation request to the good people of scikit-learn to properly document the sklearn.tree.Tree API which is the underlying tree structure that DecisionTreeClassifier exposes as its attribute tree_.

Answer 2

I've been going through this, but i needed the rules to be written in this format

if A>0.4 then if B<0.2 then if C>0.8 then class='X' 

So I adapted the answer of @paulkernfeld (thanks) that you can customize to your need

def tree_to_code(tree, feature_names, Y):
    tree_ = tree.tree_
    feature_name = [
        feature_names[i] if i != _tree.TREE_UNDEFINED else "undefined!"
        for i in tree_.feature
    ]
    pathto=dict()

    global k
    k = 0
    def recurse(node, depth, parent):
        global k
        indent = "  " * depth

        if tree_.feature[node] != _tree.TREE_UNDEFINED:
            name = feature_name[node]
            threshold = tree_.threshold[node]
            s= "{} <= {} ".format( name, threshold, node )
            if node == 0:
                pathto[node]=s
            else:
                pathto[node]=pathto[parent]+' & ' +s

            recurse(tree_.children_left[node], depth + 1, node)
            s="{} > {}".format( name, threshold)
            if node == 0:
                pathto[node]=s
            else:
                pathto[node]=pathto[parent]+' & ' +s
            recurse(tree_.children_right[node], depth + 1, node)
        else:
            k=k+1
            print(k,')',pathto[parent], tree_.value[node])
    recurse(0, 1, 0)

Answer 3

Here is my approach to extract the decision rules in a form that can be used in directly in sql, so the data can be grouped by node. (Based on the approaches of previous posters.)

The result will be subsequent CASE clauses that can be copied to an sql statement, ex.

SELECT COALESCE(*CASE WHEN <conditions> THEN > <NodeA>*, > *CASE WHEN <conditions> THEN <NodeB>*, > ....)NodeName,* > FROM <table or view>

---

import numpy as np

import pickle
feature_names=.............
features  = [feature_names[i] for i in range(len(feature_names))]
clf= pickle.loads(trained_model)
impurity=clf.tree_.impurity
importances = clf.feature_importances_
SqlOut=""

#global Conts
global ContsNode
global Path
#Conts=[]#
ContsNode=[]
Path=[]
global Results
Results=[]

def print_decision_tree(tree, feature_names, offset_unit=''    ''):    
    left      = tree.tree_.children_left
    right     = tree.tree_.children_right
    threshold = tree.tree_.threshold
    value = tree.tree_.value

    if feature_names is None:
        features  = [''f%d''%i for i in tree.tree_.feature]
    else:
        features  = [feature_names[i] for i in tree.tree_.feature]        

    def recurse(left, right, threshold, features, node, depth=0,ParentNode=0,IsElse=0):
        global Conts
        global ContsNode
        global Path
        global Results
        global LeftParents
        LeftParents=[]
        global RightParents
        RightParents=[]
        for i in range(len(left)): # This is just to tell you how to create a list.
            LeftParents.append(-1)
            RightParents.append(-1)
            ContsNode.append("")
            Path.append("")


        for i in range(len(left)): # i is node
            if (left[i]==-1 and right[i]==-1):      
                if LeftParents[i]>=0:
                    if Path[LeftParents[i]]>" ":
                        Path[i]=Path[LeftParents[i]]+" AND " +ContsNode[LeftParents[i]]                                 
                    else:
                        Path[i]=ContsNode[LeftParents[i]]                                   
                if RightParents[i]>=0:
                    if Path[RightParents[i]]>" ":
                        Path[i]=Path[RightParents[i]]+" AND not " +ContsNode[RightParents[i]]                                   
                    else:
                        Path[i]=" not " +ContsNode[RightParents[i]]                     
                Results.append(" case when  " +Path[i]+"  then ''" +"{:4d}".format(i)+ " "+"{:2.2f}".format(impurity[i])+" "+Path[i][0:180]+"''")

            else:       
                if LeftParents[i]>=0:
                    if Path[LeftParents[i]]>" ":
                        Path[i]=Path[LeftParents[i]]+" AND " +ContsNode[LeftParents[i]]                                 
                    else:
                        Path[i]=ContsNode[LeftParents[i]]                                   
                if RightParents[i]>=0:
                    if Path[RightParents[i]]>" ":
                        Path[i]=Path[RightParents[i]]+" AND not " +ContsNode[RightParents[i]]                                   
                    else:
                        Path[i]=" not "+ContsNode[RightParents[i]]                      
                if (left[i]!=-1):
                    LeftParents[left[i]]=i
                if (right[i]!=-1):
                    RightParents[right[i]]=i
                ContsNode[i]=   "( "+ features[i] + " <= " + str(threshold[i])   + " ) "

    recurse(left, right, threshold, features, 0,0,0,0)
print_decision_tree(clf,features)
SqlOut=""
for i in range(len(Results)): 
    SqlOut=SqlOut+Results[i]+ " end,"+chr(13)+chr(10)

Answer 4

Here is a way to translate the whole tree into a single (not necessarily too human-readable) python expression using the SKompiler library:

from skompiler import skompile
skompile(dtree.predict).to('python/code')

Answer 5

I modified the code submitted by Zelazny7 to print some pseudocode:

def get_code(tree, feature_names):
        left      = tree.tree_.children_left
        right     = tree.tree_.children_right
        threshold = tree.tree_.threshold
        features  = [feature_names[i] for i in tree.tree_.feature]
        value = tree.tree_.value

        def recurse(left, right, threshold, features, node):
                if (threshold[node] != -2):
                        print "if ( " + features[node] + " <= " + str(threshold[node]) + " ) {"
                        if left[node] != -1:
                                recurse (left, right, threshold, features,left[node])
                        print "} else {"
                        if right[node] != -1:
                                recurse (left, right, threshold, features,right[node])
                        print "}"
                else:
                        print "return " + str(value[node])

        recurse(left, right, threshold, features, 0)

if you call get_code(dt, df.columns) on the same example you will obtain:

if ( col1 <= 0.5 ) {
return [[ 1.  0.]]
} else {
if ( col2 <= 4.5 ) {
return [[ 0.  1.]]
} else {
if ( col1 <= 2.5 ) {
return [[ 1.  0.]]
} else {
return [[ 0.  1.]]
}
}
}

Answer 6

Scikit learn introduced a delicious new method called export_text in version 0.21 (May 2019) to extract the rules from a tree. Documentation here. It's no longer necessary to create a custom function.

Once you've fit your model, you just need two lines of code. First, import export_text:

from sklearn.tree.export import export_text

Second, create an object that will contain your rules. To make the rules look more readable, use the feature_names argument and pass a list of your feature names. For example, if your model is called model and your features are named in a dataframe called X_train, you could create an object called tree_rules:

tree_rules = export_text(model, feature_names=list(X_train))

Then just print or save tree_rules. Your output will look like this:

|--- Age <= 0.63
|   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.61
|   |   |--- Age <= -0.16
|   |   |   |--- class: 0
|   |   |--- Age >  -0.16
|   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= -0.06
|   |   |   |   |--- class: 0
|   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary >  -0.06
|   |   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.40
|   |   |   |   |   |--- EstimatedSalary <= 0.03
|   |   |   |   |   |   |--- class: 1