A Study on Decision Tree for Multiple Binary Responses

The tree method can be extended to multivariate responses, such as repeated measure and longitudinal data, by modifying the split function so as to accommodate multiple responses. Recently, some decision trees for multiple responses have been constructed by Segal (1992) and Zhang (1998). Segal suggested a tree can analyze continuous longitudinal response using Mahalanobis distance for within node homogeneity measures and Zhang suggested a tree can analyze multiple binary responses using generalized entropy criterion which is proportional to maximum likelihood of joint distribution of multiple binary responses. In this paper, we will modify CART procedure and suggest a new tree-based method that can analyze multiple binary responses using similarity measures.