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I'm considering building MATLAB and R interfaces to Ross Quinlan's C5.0 (for those not familiar with it, C5.0 is a decision tree algorithm and software package; an extension of C4.5), and I am trying to get a sense of the components I would need to write.

The only documentation I found for C5.0 is here, which is a tutorial for See5 (a Windows interface to C5.0?) . The tar file comes with a Makefile, but no Readme files or any additional documentation.

From what I read in the tutorial above, C5.0 uses an ASCII-based representation to handle inputs and outputs, and I am also considering building an interface that passes binary data directly between MATLAB or R and C5.0. Is C5.0's data representation used by any other machine-learning/classification software?

Has anybody tried building a MATLAB or an R interface to ID3, C4.5 or C5.0 before?

Thanks

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  • $\begingroup$ Is this project going on? I tried to install the package C5.0 in R, but failed. $\endgroup$
    – user4938
    Commented Jun 8, 2011 at 14:05
  • $\begingroup$ Did you ever made an implementation of C5 for Matlab? If you did, it would be extremely useful. I am looking at interfacing C5 with Matlab right now, but C5 seems a bit messy (cannot just pass text files to and from it since it uses difficult formatting). $\endgroup$
    – dcm29
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 5:06

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That sounds like a great idea, especially as the page you link to shows that C5.0 is now under GPL.

I have some experience wrapping C/C++ software to R using Rcpp; I would be happy to help.

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    $\begingroup$ thanks a lot for offering to help. We have a couple of students in our lab who may look into this. We'll let you know as soon as we figure things out :) $\endgroup$
    – Amelio Vazquez-Reina
    Commented Feb 18, 2011 at 16:08
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Interfacing C/C++ code to MATLAB is pretty straightforward, all you have to do is create a MEX gateway function to handle the conversion of parameters and return parameters. I have experience in making MEX files to do this sort of thing and would be happy to help.

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  • $\begingroup$ that sounds great! Thanks for being willing to help. We have a couple of students in our lab and they might reach out to you if we need help. $\endgroup$
    – Amelio Vazquez-Reina
    Commented Feb 18, 2011 at 16:10
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UPDATE:

Now on CRAN:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/C50/index.html

ORIGINAL:

We've been working on this for a bit now (starting with Cubist then working on C5.0).

If you'd like to contribute:

https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/rulebasedmodels/

was created recently and we should be checking the initial code in.

We've had access to the Cubist sources for a while now (but there was an explicit agreement not to link it to other sw) and been debating the different options for incorporating the code, but I thin

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The C5.0 (Linux) documentation is at http://rulequest.com/see5-unix.html

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