How do Decision Trees compare with rule-based systems?

Decision Trees automatically learn rules from data, while rule-based systems rely on manually defined rules.

Rule-based systems require domain experts to define if-else logic manually, making them static and brittle. Decision Trees, however, learn hierarchical rules directly from data using impurity-based optimization. Each path from root to leaf represents a learned rule. While trees are more flexible and adaptive, rule-based systems are more interpretable and predictable in constrained domains.