I've been trying to get a grip on the importance of features used in a decision tree i've modelled. I'm interested in discovering the weight of each feature selected at the nodes as well as the term itself. My data is a bunch of documents. This is my code for the decision tree, I modified the code snippet from scikit-learn that extract (http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/ensemble/plot_forest_importances.html): from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer ### Feature extraction tfidf_vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(stop_words=stopwords, use_idf=True, tokenizer=None, ngram_range=(1,2))#ngram_range=(1,0) tfidf_matrix = tfidf_vectorizer.fit_transform(data[:, 1]) terms = tfidf_vectorizer.get_features_names() ### Define Decision Tree and fit dtclf = DecisionTreeClassifier(random_state=1234) dt = data.copy() y = dt["label"] X = tfidf_matrix fitdt = dtclf.fit(X, y) from sklearn.datasets import load_iris from sklearn import tree ### Visualize Devision Tree with open('data.dot', 'w') as file: tree.export_graphviz(dtclf, out_file = file, feature_names = terms) file.close() import subprocess subprocess.call(['dot', '-Tpdf', 'data.dot', '-o' 'data.pdf']) ### Extract feature importance importances = dtclf.feature_importances_ indices = np.argsort(importances)[::-1] # Print the feature ranking print('Feature Ranking:') for f in range(tfidf_matrix.shape[1]): if importances[indices[f]] > 0: print("%d. feature %d (%f)" % (f + 1, indices[f], importances[indices[f]])) print ("feature name: ", terms[indices[f]]) Am I correct in assuming that using terms[indices[f]] (which is the feature term vector ) will print the actual feature term used to split the tree at a certain node? The decision tree visualised with GraphViz has for instance X[30], I'm assuming this is refers to the numerical interpretation of the feature term. How do I extract the term itself so I can validate the process I deployed in #1? Updated code fitdt = dtclf.fit(X, y) with open(...): tree.export_graphviz(dtclf, out_file = file, feature_names = terms) Thanks in advance Continue reading...