sentences: Decision Tree Classifiers (DTC's) are used successfully in many diverse areas such as radar signal classification, character recognition, remote sensing, medical diagnosis, expert systems, and speech recognition, to name only a few. Perhaps, the most important feature of DTC's is their capability to break down a complex decision-making process into a collection of simpler decisions, thus providing a solution which is often easier to interpret. This paper presents a survey of current methods for DTC designs and the various existing issues. After considering potential advantages of DTC's over single stage classifiers, subjects of tree structure design, feature selection at each internal node, and decision and search strategies are discussed_ Finally, several remarks are made concerning possible future research directions.