CART is an acronym for Classification and Regression Trees, a decision-tree procedure introduced in 1984 by world-renowned UC Berkeley and Stanford statisticians, Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Richard Olshen, and Charles Stone. Their landmark work created the modern field of sophisticated, mathematically- and theoretically-founded decision trees. The CART methodology solves a number of performance, accuracy, and operational problems that still plague many other current decision-tree methods. CART's innovations include:

• solving the “how big to grow the tree” problem;
• using strictly two-way (binary) splitting;
• incorporating automatic testing and tree validation; and
• providing a completely new method for handling missing values.