Do Decision Trees Need Feature Scaling Or Normalization?
In general, no. Decision trees are not sensitive to feature scaling because their splits don’t change with any monotonic transformation. Normalization is not necessary either, but it can change your results because it’s not monotonic, as we’ll see later. That said, the numerical implementation of a specific library may make your decision tree predictions change if you don’t scale or normalize your data. This is usually a very small change, that you don’t need to worry about, but it’s good to know if you find yourself in a situation where you need to explain why your predictions are different....