I read two papers discussing how to compare between decision trees. One of them is RTED (that is specifically for trees and sub-case is decision trees) can be found here (RTED: A Robust Algorithm for the Tree Edit Distance)here:and additional approach is COMBINING CLASSIFICATION TREES USING MLE by Shannon and Banks (Shannon, W. D., & Banks, D. (1999). Combining classification trees using MLE. Statistics in Medicine, 18(6), 727-740.). I would like to know if the MLE method is a sub case of RTED algorithm for comparison between decision trees?Comparison between decision trees I mean, given 2 decision trees we would like to compare the structure of them. It means by the location and the name of each node. The RTED transfers the trees into a Bracket Tree Format that contains the names of the tree nodes and compares between the 2 strings. The output is a number that is the Tree distance value (also know in literature Edit Distance).The question is if the algorithm described by Shannon and Banks (called MLE) is a specific case that is covered by RTED algorithm. If the final result of comparison between 2 decision trees will yield same result. If the answer is No, what are the cases in which the different algorithms will give different results?
Comparison of Decision Trees: RTED vs MLE
algorithms;trees
The main difference between MLE and RTED is that RTED can compare any kind of decision tree even non binary such as CHAID. In addition, each of them has different approach for scanning the tree. MLE is from top down and find all the possible paths while RTED can go in breadth way. 