title: [The application of decision tree in the research of anemia among rural children under 3-year-old].
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To study the application of decision tree in the research of anemia among rural children.
  
  
  METHODS
  In the Enterprise Miner module of software SAS 8.2, 3000 observations were sampled from database and the decision tree model was built. The model using decision tree of CART bases on Gini impurity index.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The misclassification rate of decision tree model was, training set 21.2%, validation set 21.9%. The Root ASE of decision tree model was, training set 0.399, validation set 0.404. The area under the ROC curve was larger than the reference line. The diagnostic chart showed that the corresponding percentage was higher than the other. The decision tree model selected 9 important factors and ranked them by their power, among which mother of anemia (1.00) was the most important factor. Others were children's age (0.75), time of ablactation (0.53), mother's age (0.32), the time of egg supplementation (0.26), category of the project county (0.26), the time of milk supplementation (0.16), number of people in the family (0.13), the education status of the mother (0.12). Decision tree produced simple and easy rules that might be used to classify and predict in the same research.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Decision tree could screen out the important factors of anemia and identify the cutting-points for factors. With the wide application of decision tree, it would exhibit important application values in the research of the rural children health care.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Public Health, School of Medicine Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710061, China.
authors.forename: Yu-gang
authors.initials: YG
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Yu-xue
authors.initials: YX
authors.lastname: Bi
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yan
authors.forename: Li-na
authors.initials: LN
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.forename: Wei-feng
authors.initials: WF
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Bei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xue-li
authors.initials: XL
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000740:Anemia / Q000517:prevention & control*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003663:Decision Trees; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D012424:Rural Population; D012494:Sampling Studies