Decision Trees Versus Decision Tables for Audit Test Data Design: An Experimental Study

Use of test data is an important evidence collection method that auditors can employ to evaluate the authenticity, accuracy, and completeness of program processing. Nevertheless, test data design is a time‐consuming and error‐prone process. To facilitate design, two approaches advocated are the decision‐tree approach and the decision‐table approach. An experiment conducted to examine the quality of test data designs produced using both approaches showed some support for the superiority of the decision‐table approach over the decision‐tree approach. Insofar as the results obtained are problematical, however, the research needs to be replicated and extended.