How do I restrict variables from being used more than once in a decision tree analysis?

[newsasuser2017]

I am trying to run a decision tree analysis in Enterprise Miner. I have 6 variables (lets say A-F) which I am using as the inputs and have one binary target variable. When I run the analysis, I get a couple leaf nodes where the variables are repeated. For e.g. the analysis finds A as the strongest predictor and uses that as the root node and then halfway through one of the branches uses A again as the splitter variable. Is there a way I can prevent this from happening and force it to use each variable as the splitter variable only once at the maximum? I have SAS 9.4.

[art297 · Accepted solution]

I don't know if the option is in EM's decision tree, but both proc split and proc hpsplit have an option that does that, namely USEVARONCE (see: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/stathpug/67524/HTML/default/viewer.htm#stathpug_hpsplit_... ). You might want to check to see if it is available in EM's decision tree node.

Art, CEO, AnalystFinder.com