We exhibit a theoretically founded algorithm T2 for agnostic PAC-learning of decision trees of at most 2 levels, whose computation time is almost linear in the size of the training set. We evaluate the performance of this learning algorithm T2 on 15 common "real-world" datasets, and show that for most of these datasets T2 provides simple decision trees with little or no loss in predictive power (compared with C4.5). In fact, for datasets with continuous attributes its error rate tends to be lower than that of C4.5. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a PAC-learning algorithm is shown to be applicable to "real-world" classification problems.
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