Difference between decision tree and rule based reasoner I am new to this topic, and in some scientific papers I've been reading about prediction in sports I encountered the term rule based reasoner. Is it this term the same as a semantic reasoner( where the two main directions are forward and backwards chaining?). If yes, can you point out the difference between a decision tree and this? Because for me, it seems pretty much the same.
Decision tree classifiers could be easily converted to rule based classifiers in data mining and vice Versa. please have a look at "Introduction to Data Mining", chapters 4 and 5.

Usually it depends on the data characteristics, how to choose between these two methods and which of the mentioned methods give you smaller classification errors.