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When people say Decision Tree Software they can be talking about a whole range of products - some of them highly complex and very expensive.

Mapit Designer is described as a simple decision tree tool but what is a decision tree?

Wikipedia describe a Decision Tree as "a decision support tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. Decision trees are commonly used in operations research, specifically in decision analysis, to help identify a strategy most likely to reach a goal. Another use of decision trees is as a descriptive means for calculating conditional probabilities."

That is pretty comprehensive although there is more detail about the use of decision trees in data mining and machine learning. From there we can progress to regression trees, classification trees and how to use a decision tree as a predictive model.

Maybe that is why we kept Mapit as a Simple Decision Tree Tool!

So lets narrow that definition down to say that Mapit Designer can be classified as "a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences."

Wikipedia describes decision trees used as a decision tree tool as:

• "Simple to understand and interpret. People are able to understand decision tree models after a brief explanation.
• Having value even with little hard data. Important insights can be generated based on experts describing a situation (its alternatives, probabilities, and costs) and their preferences for outcomes."

Mapit Designer helps your experts create a decision tree to take your users (customers, staff members, survey registrants and so on) through some complex information in a way that is easy to follow and leads to a defined destination or answer.

You can attach values as you proceed through the decision tree but we leave analysis for other applications more suited to that task.