Regression Trees

While multiple regression is a great tool for analyzing data, most clients (sadly) have a hard time “getting” it. Over the years of working with corporate executives I have found that regression trees are much easier for non-stat people to understand.

Below is a tree from SYSTAT that was created from data collected by employees in annual employee satisfaction study. Putting the tree together and making it “pretty” helped C-level executives understand what we needed to work on. Please be sure you transform your data before running your analtyics. Employee satisfaction data nearly always has negative skewness.

Employee satisfaction is a fascinating topic. A decent introduction and review can be found in this book:





Here’s a great book to get ideas on conveying data visually