How to I define penalties to make it harder for a predictor to become the primary splitter in the node?
A29: CART supports three “improvement penalties.” The “natural” improvement for a splitter is always computed according to the CART methodology. A penalty may be imposed, however, that causes the improvement to be lessened depending, affecting the penalized splitter´s relative ranking among competitor splits. If the penalty is enough to cause the top competitor to be replaced by a competitor, the tree is changed.
