Viewing Models Details for Decision Trees using SQL

When you are working with and developing Decision Trees by far the easiest way to visualise these is by using the Oracle Data Miner (ODMr) tool that is part of SQL Developer.
Developing your Decision Tree models using the ODMr allows you to explore the decision tree produced, to drill in on each of the nodes of the tree and to see all the statistics etc that relate to each node and branch of the tree.
But when you are working with the DBMS_DATA_MINING PL/SQL package and with the SQL commands for Oracle Data Mining you don't have the same luxury of the graphical tool that we have in ODMr. For example here is an image of part of a Decision Tree I have and was developed using ODMr.

What if we are not using the ODMr tool? In that case you will be using SQL and PL/SQL. When using these you do not have luxury of viewing the Decision Tree.
So what can you see of the Decision Tree? Most of the model details can be used by a variety of functions that can apply the model to your data. I've covered many of these over the years on this blog.
For most of the data mining algorithms there is a PL/SQL function available in the DBMS_DATA_MINING package that allows you to see inside the models to find out the settings, rules, etc. Most of these packages have a name something like GET_MODEL_DETAILS_XXXX, where XXXX is the name of the algorithm. For example GET_MODEL_DETAILS_NB will get the details of a Naive Bayes model. But when you look through the list there doesn't seem to be one for Decision Trees.
Actually there is and it is called GET_MODEL_DETAILS_XML. This function takes one parameter, the name of the Decision Tree model and produces an XML formatted output that contains the attributes used by the model, the overall model settings, then for each node and branch the attributes and the values used and the other statistical measures required for each node/branch.
The following SQL uses this PL/SQL function to get the Decision Tree details for model called CLAS_DT_1_59.
SELECT dbms_data_mining.get_model_details_xml('CLAS_DT_1_59')
FROM dual;

If you are using SQL Developer you will need to double click on the output column and click on the pencil icon to view the full listing.

Nothing too fancy like what we get in ODMr, but it is something that we can work with.
If you examine the XML output you will see references to PMML. This refers to the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) and this is defined by the Data Mining Group (www.dmg.org). I will discuss the PMML in another blog post and how you can use it with Oracle Data Mining.