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Developing OO implementation of decision trees

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carbonel

Technical User
Apr 4, 2008
1
US
I'm attempting to develop an object-oriented approach to the implementation of decision trees. By "decision tree," I'm referring to a series of yes/no decision pathways that can be used to classify an object or to recommend a course of action.

The procedural approach to decision trees would be a series of nested "if then else" statements, but I realize that this isn't the ideal solution for an object oriented context. Ideally, I would like to come up with some sort of abstract pathway object that could contain anywhere between 2 and 15 boolean decision points. (Ultimately, they may be multiple choice decision points, but I'm simplifying for now with boolean variables). At each decision point, the system would give the user a prompt and ask for yes/no clarification. When the user enters the answer, the system would either move to the next decision point or recommend some sort of action.

Any help in conceptualizing this would be greatly appreciated. I know that the object will need to read the values of the decision pathways from a database, but I can't figure out how to conceptualize this with sufficient abstraction that one class could encompass all potential decision trees.

Thanks!

(Note: I'm working with ASP.NET and C#, but my question is more conceptual than syntactical.)
 
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