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

There is a new DecisionTreeClassifier method, decision_path, in the 0.18.0 release. The developers provide an extensive (well-documented) walkthrough.

The first section of code in the walkthrough that prints the tree structure seems to be OK. However, I modified the code in the second section to interrogate one sample. My changes denoted with # <--

Edit The changes marked by # <-- in the code below have since been updated in walkthrough link after the errors were pointed out in pull requests #8653 and #10951. It's much easier to follow along now.

sample_id = 0
node_index = node_indicator.indices[node_indicator.indptr[sample_id]:
                                    node_indicator.indptr[sample_id + 1]]

print('Rules used to predict sample %s: ' % sample_id)
for node_id in node_index:

    if leave_id[sample_id] == node_id:  # <-- changed != to ==
        #continue # <-- comment out
        print("leaf node {} reached, no decision here".format(leave_id[sample_id])) # <--

    else: # < -- added else to iterate through decision nodes
        if (X_test[sample_id, feature[node_id]] <= threshold[node_id]):
            threshold_sign = "<="
        else:
            threshold_sign = ">"

        print("decision id node %s : (X[%s, %s] (= %s) %s %s)"
              % (node_id,
                 sample_id,
                 feature[node_id],
                 X_test[sample_id, feature[node_id]], # <-- changed i to sample_id
                 threshold_sign,
                 threshold[node_id]))

Rules used to predict sample 0: 
decision id node 0 : (X[0, 3] (= 2.4) > 0.800000011921)
decision id node 2 : (X[0, 2] (= 5.1) > 4.94999980927)
leaf node 4 reached, no decision here

Change the sample_id to see the decision paths for other samples. I haven't asked the developers about these changes, just seemed more intuitive when working through the example.

Answer 2

You can also make it more informative by distinguishing it to which class it belongs or even by mentioning its output value.

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):
        offset = offset_unit*depth
        if (threshold[node] != -2):
                print(offset+"if ( " + features[node] + " <= " + str(threshold[node]) + " ) {")
                if left[node] != -1:
                        recurse (left, right, threshold, features,left[node],depth+1)
                print(offset+"} else {")
                if right[node] != -1:
                        recurse (left, right, threshold, features,right[node],depth+1)
                print(offset+"}")
        else:
                #print(offset,value[node]) 

                #To remove values from node
                temp=str(value[node])
                mid=len(temp)//2
                tempx=[]
                tempy=[]
                cnt=0
                for i in temp:
                    if cnt<=mid:
                        tempx.append(i)
                        cnt+=1
                    else:
                        tempy.append(i)
                        cnt+=1
                val_yes=[]
                val_no=[]
                res=[]
                for j in tempx:
                    if j=="[" or j=="]" or j=="." or j==" ":
                        res.append(j)
                    else:
                        val_no.append(j)
                for j in tempy:
                    if j=="[" or j=="]" or j=="." or j==" ":
                        res.append(j)
                    else:
                        val_yes.append(j)
                val_yes = int("".join(map(str, val_yes)))
                val_no = int("".join(map(str, val_no)))

                if val_yes>val_no:
                    print(offset,'\033[1m',"YES")
                    print('\033[0m')
                elif val_no>val_yes:
                    print(offset,'\033[1m',"NO")
                    print('\033[0m')
                else:
                    print(offset,'\033[1m',"Tie")
                    print('\033[0m')

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

Answer 3

Just because everyone was so helpful I'll just add a modification to Zelazny7 and Daniele's beautiful solutions. This one is for python 2.7, with tabs to make it more readable:

def get_code(tree, feature_names, tabdepth=0):
    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, tabdepth=0):
            if (threshold[node] != -2):
                    print '\t' * tabdepth,
                    print "if ( " + features[node] + " <= " + str(threshold[node]) + " ) {"
                    if left[node] != -1:
                            recurse (left, right, threshold, features,left[node], tabdepth+1)
                    print '\t' * tabdepth,
                    print "} else {"
                    if right[node] != -1:
                            recurse (left, right, threshold, features,right[node], tabdepth+1)
                    print '\t' * tabdepth,
                    print "}"
            else:
                    print '\t' * tabdepth,
                    print "return " + str(value[node])

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

Answer 4

from StringIO import StringIO
out = StringIO()
out = tree.export_graphviz(clf, out_file=out)
print out.getvalue()

You can see a digraph Tree. Then, clf.tree_.feature and clf.tree_.value are array of nodes splitting feature and array of nodes values respectively. You can refer to more details from this github source.

Answer 5

This builds on @paulkernfeld 's answer. If you have a dataframe X with your features and a target dataframe y with your resonses and you you want to get an idea which y value ended in which node (and also ant to plot it accordingly) you can do the following:

    def tree_to_code(tree, feature_names):
        from sklearn.tree import _tree
        codelines = []
        codelines.append('def get_cat(X_tmp):\n')
        codelines.append('   catout = []\n')
        codelines.append('   for codelines in range(0,X_tmp.shape[0]):\n')
        codelines.append('      Xin = X_tmp.iloc[codelines]\n')
        tree_ = tree.tree_
        feature_name = [
            feature_names[i] if i != _tree.TREE_UNDEFINED else "undefined!"
            for i in tree_.feature
        ]
        #print "def tree({}):".format(", ".join(feature_names))

        def recurse(node, depth):
            indent = "      " * depth
            if tree_.feature[node] != _tree.TREE_UNDEFINED:
                name = feature_name[node]
                threshold = tree_.threshold[node]
                codelines.append ('{}if Xin["{}"] <= {}:\n'.format(indent, name, threshold))
                recurse(tree_.children_left[node], depth + 1)
                codelines.append( '{}else:  # if Xin["{}"] > {}\n'.format(indent, name, threshold))
                recurse(tree_.children_right[node], depth + 1)
            else:
                codelines.append( '{}mycat = {}\n'.format(indent, node))

        recurse(0, 1)
        codelines.append('      catout.append(mycat)\n')
        codelines.append('   return pd.DataFrame(catout,index=X_tmp.index,columns=["category"])\n')
        codelines.append('node_ids = get_cat(X)\n')
        return codelines
    mycode = tree_to_code(clf,X.columns.values)

    # now execute the function and obtain the dataframe with all nodes
    exec(''.join(mycode))
    node_ids = [int(x[0]) for x in node_ids.values]
    node_ids2 = pd.DataFrame(node_ids)

    print('make plot')
    import matplotlib.cm as cm
    colors = cm.rainbow(np.linspace(0, 1, 1+max( list(set(node_ids)))))
    #plt.figure(figsize=cm2inch(24, 21))
    for i in list(set(node_ids)):
        plt.plot(y[node_ids2.values==i],'o',color=colors[i], label=str(i))  
    mytitle = ['y colored by node']
    plt.title(mytitle ,fontsize=14)
    plt.xlabel('my xlabel')
    plt.ylabel(tagname)
    plt.xticks(rotation=70)       
    plt.legend(loc='upper center', bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, 1.00), shadow=True, ncol=9)
    plt.tight_layout()
    plt.show()
    plt.close 

not the most elegant version but it does the job...

Answer 6

Here is a function, printing rules of a scikit-learn decision tree under python 3 and with offsets for conditional blocks to make the structure more readable:

def print_decision_tree(tree, feature_names=None, offset_unit='    '):
    '''Plots textual representation of rules of a decision tree
    tree: scikit-learn representation of tree
    feature_names: list of feature names. They are set to f1,f2,f3,... if not specified
    offset_unit: a string of offset of the conditional block'''

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

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