Ross Quinlan

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John Ross Quinlan is a pioneering researcher in data mining and decision theory. He has contributed extensively to the development of decision tree algorithms, including inventing the canonical C4.5 and ID3 algorithms.

He is a specialist in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the aspect involving Machine Learning and its application to Data Mining. He received his computer science doctorate at the University of Washington in 1968. He has held positions at the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and RAND Corporation. [1]

He is currently running the company RuleQuest Research which he founded in 1997. According to the company website:

RuleQuest Research is a small Australian company dedicated to the development of high-performance data mining tools. Since it opened its doors in 1997, RuleQuest has won thousands of users in more than 40 countries with applications as diverse as geographic information systems (GIS), pharmaceutics, customer relations management (CRM), and text analysis. Accounts of some of these are grouped under classification (See5/C5.0) and predicting values (Cubist).[2]

Ross Quinlan invented the Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) algorithm which is used to generate decision trees. ID3 follows the principal of Occam's razor in attempting to create the smallest decision tree possible[4]. He then expanded upon the principals used in ID3 to create C4.5.

C5.0 which Quinlan is commercially selling is an improvement on C4.5. The advantages are several orders of magnitude faster, memory efficiency, smaller decision trees, Boosting (more accuracy), ability to weight different attributes, and Winnowing (reducing noise). [5]