Decision trees for beginners

[deleted_user]

Dear All,
in order to get started with decision trees I would like to ask my computer to produce a decision tree from a data set with one dependent variable (disease yes/no) and several independent variables (usually I would run logistic regression for these data). The tree should "decide" which variables are important risk factors for the disease. Any hints for a bloody beginner in decision trees but fairly experienced SAS user (no access to SAS enterprise miner)?
Thanks in advance

[deleted_user]

You might want to run PROC ARBOR directly, which is the background procedure for the Decision Tree node in EM. Please refer to the documentation http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/miner/em43/proc_arbor.pdf. This is an olde version, but is still mostly valid.

For your case, the following generic code should work.

proc arbor data=;
input ...;
target disease;
save importance=;
score data= out=;
quit;

The SAVE IMPORTANCE= dataset contains variable importance results based on splits. The SCORE OUT= dataset contains the output results such as predictions for the score dataset DATA=.