ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Ripple down rules

Imagine you have a toy box filled with different toys. You have blocks, cars, dolls, and balls. You ask your mom to help you clean up the toy box. Your mom tells you to start picking up the blocks first. Once you have picked up all the blocks, she tells you to move on to the cars. Then, you can move on to the dolls, and finally the balls.

This is how ripple down rules work. It helps people organize things in a specific order. Just like how your mom helped you organize your toys by telling you to pick up the blocks first, ripple down rules organize information in a specific way.

In computer science, ripple down rules are used in machine learning. It helps create decision trees that can predict outcomes. For example, let's say you want to predict the weather. The decision tree would start with a question like, "Is it winter or summer?" If it's winter, the next question could be, "Is there snow on the ground?" If there is snow, the decision tree would predict that it's cold outside.

The ripple down rules help organize the decision tree by asking specific questions in a specific order. This makes it easier to predict outcomes accurately. So, just like how your mom helped you organize your toys, ripple down rules help organize and predict outcomes in machine learning.