The analysis of large data sets with hundreds of thousands observations and thousands of independent variables is a formidable computational task. A less parametric method, capable of identifying important independent variables and their interactions, is a tree structured approach to regression and classification. It gives a graphical and often illuminating way of looking at data in classification and regression problems. In this paper, we have reviewed and summarized tile methodology used to construct a tree, multiple trees and the sequential strategy for identifying active compounds in large chemical databases.