The edge is the weighted mean value of the classification margin. The weights are class prior probabilities. If you supply additional weights, those weights are normalized to sum to the prior probabilities in the respective classes, and are then used to compute the weighted average.

The classification margin is the difference between the classification score for the true class and maximal classification score for the false classes.

The classification margin is a column vector with the same number of rows as in the matrix X. A high value of margin indicates a more reliable prediction than a low value.

For discriminant analysis, the score of a classification is the posterior probability of the classification. For the definition of posterior probability in discriminant analysis, see Posterior Probability.

For trees, the score of a classification of a leaf node is the posterior probability of the classification at that node. The posterior probability of the classification at a node is the number of training sequences that lead to that node with the classification, divided by the number of training sequences that lead to that node.

For example, consider classifying a predictor X as true when X < 0.15 or X > 0.95, and X is false otherwise.

Generate 100 random points and classify them:

rng(0,'twister') % for reproducibility
X = rand(100,1);
Y = (abs(X - .55) > .4);
tree = fitctree(X,Y);
view(tree,'Mode','Graph')

Prune the tree:

tree1 = prune(tree,'Level',1);
view(tree1,'Mode','Graph')

The pruned tree correctly classifies observations that are less than 0.15 as true. It also correctly classifies observations from .15 to .94 as false. However, it incorrectly classifies observations that are greater than .94 as false. Therefore, the score for observations that are greater than .15 should be about .05/.85=.06 for true, and about .8/.85=.94 for false.

Compute the prediction scores for the first 10 rows of X:

[~,score] = predict(tree1,X(1:10));
[score X(1:10,:)]

ans = 10×3

    0.9059    0.0941    0.8147
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9058
         0    1.0000    0.1270
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9134
    0.9059    0.0941    0.6324
         0    1.0000    0.0975
    0.9059    0.0941    0.2785
    0.9059    0.0941    0.5469
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9575
    0.9059    0.0941    0.9649

Indeed, every value of X (the right-most column) that is less than 0.15 has associated scores (the left and center columns) of 0 and 1, while the other values of X have associated scores of 0.91 and 0.09. The difference (score 0.09 instead of the expected .06) is due to a statistical fluctuation: there are 8 observations in X in the range (.95,1) instead of the expected 5 observations.