A MapReduce Implementation of C4.5 Decision Tree Algorithm

Recent years have witness the development of cloud computing and the big data era, which brings up challenges to traditional decision tree algorithms. First, as the size of dataset becomes extremely big, the process of building a decision tree can be quite time consuming. Second, because the data cannot fit in memory any more, some computation must be moved to the external storage and therefore increases the I/O cost. To this end, we propose to implement a typical decision tree algorithm, C4.5, using MapReduce programming model. Specifically, we transform the traditional algorithm into a series of Map and Reduce procedures. Besides, we design some data structures to minimize the communication cost. We also conduct extensive experiments on a massive dataset. The results indicate that our algorithm exhibits both time efficiency and scalability.