Breaking Down The Gini Index: How Economics Inspired Machine Learning

Author(s): Egor Howell

Originally published on Towards AI.

How the Gini index from economics is now a crucial concept for machine learning

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Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

The Gini index is a popular tool within Data Science that is responsible for deciding how decision trees split. However, most practitioners are unaware that the Gini index originally came from economics as a measure of wealth inequality. In this post, I want to dive into the details of the Gini index and its origins.

Introduced by Corrado Gini in 1912, the Gini index (or coefficient) measures the distribution of income within a country or state. A Gini index of 0 indicates perfect inequality where… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI