j. Decision trees

Decision trees are a form of predictive model that enables businesses to mine data more effectively. A decision tree is technically a machine learning technique, but because of its simplicity, it is more often referred to as a white box machine learning technique. Users can see how the data inputs influence the outputs using a decision tree. A random forest is a predictive analytics model that is created by combining different decision tree models. Complicated random forest models are referred to as "black box" machine learning techniques because their outputs are not always easy to comprehend based on their inputs. However, in most cases, this simple form of ensemble modeling is more effective than relying solely on decision trees (**Figure 3**).

**Figure 3.** *Example of a decision tree [15].*
