Adaptive MSD-Splitting: Enhancing C4.5 and Random Forests for Skewed Continuous Attributes

arXiv:2604.19722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The discretization of continuous numerical attributes remains a persistent computational bottleneck in the induction of decision trees, particularly as dataset dimensions scale. Building upon the recently proposed MSD-Splitting technique -- which bins continuous data using the empirical mean and standard deviation to dramatically improve the efficiency and accuracy of the C4.5 algorithm -- we introduce Adaptive MSD-Splitting (AMSD). While standar