We are given the following tree that we will use to classify a particular example
x
:
In this tree, each
p
value indicates the probability that
x
will be classified as belonging to a class in the right subtree of the node at which that
p
was computed. For example, the probability that
x
belongs to Class 2 is
(1−p1)×p2
. Recall that at training time this is a very efficient representation because we only have to consider a single branch of the tree. However, at test-time we need to look over all branches in order to determine the probabilities of each outcome.
Suppose we are not interested in obtaining the exact probability of every outcome, but instead we just want to find the class with the maximum probability. A simple heuristic is to search the tree greedily by starting at the root and choosing the branch with maximum probability at each node on our way from the root to the leaves. That is, at the root of this tree we would choose to go right if
p1≥0.5
and left otherwise.
For this particular tree, what would make it more likely that these two methods (exact search and greedy search) will report the same class?