Recent advances in decision trees: an updated survey

Decision Trees (DTs) are predictive models in supervised learning, known not only for their unquestionable utility in a wide range of applications but also for their interpretability and robustness. Research on the subject is still going strong after almost 60 years since its original inception, and in the last decade, several researchers have tackled key matters in the field. Although many great surveys have been published in the past, there is a gap since none covers the last decade of the field as a whole. This paper proposes a review of the main recent advances in DT research, focusing on three major goals of a predictive learner: issues regarding the fitting of training data, generalization, and interpretability. Moreover, by organizing several topics that have been previously analyzed in isolation, this survey attempts to provide an overview of the field, its key concerns, and future trends, serving as a good entry point for both researchers and newcomers to the machine learning community.