Before the CART

These pages are an online supplement for a paper in Teaching Statistics called What goes before the CART? Introducing classification trees with Arbor and CODAP by Joachim Engel and Tim Erickson.

These pages give you, the reader, a chance to build trees using the Arbor tool and get a feel for using CODAP. We have also incorporated this material into a much larger online book, Awash in Data.

CODAP is a free, web-based data analysis platform. Arbor is a CODAP plugin that helps you make classification trees.

To learn CODAP basics, here are two strategies:

• Work through the getting started lesson in the “Awash” book.
• Open CODAP, choose to get a sample document, and choose Getting started with CODAP.

Would you like to play a game?

Of course you would.

The paper mentions and references an online game called Xeno. In Xeno, you are trying to diagnose extraterrestrial creatures based on health data. Your creatures will face a sequence of maladies, getting harder and harder to diagnose.

Here is a link to a CODAP document that has the game, including some instructions about how to play.