One of the key decisions financial institutions have to make as part of their daily operations is to decide whether or not to grant a loan to an applicant. With the emergence of large-scale data-storing facilities, huge amounts of data have been stored regarding the repayment behavior of past...

Decision trees are a widely used knowledge representation in machine learning. However, one of their main drawbacks is the inherent replication of isomorphic subtrees, as a result of which the produced classifiers might become too large to be comprehensible by the human experts that have to...