Popular Decision Tree: CHAID Analysis, Automatic Interaction
Detection General CHAID Introductory Overview The acronym CHAID
stands for Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector. It is one
of the oldest tree classification methods originally proposed by
Kass (1980). According to Ripley, 1996, the CHAID algorithm is a
descendent of THAID developed by Morgan and Messenger, (1973).
CHAID will "build" non-binary trees (i.e., trees where more than
two branches can attach to a single root or node), based on a
relatively simple algorithm that is particularly well suited for
the analysis of larger datasets. Also, because the CHAID
algorithm will often effectively yield many multi-way frequency
tables (e.g., when classifying a categorical response variable
with many categories, based on categorical predictors with many
classes), it has been particularly popular in marketing
research, in the context of market segmentation studies. Both
CHAID and C&RT techniques will construct trees, where each (non-
terminal) node iden