Distinguishing the rare spectra from the majority of stellar spectra is one of quite important issues in astronomy. As the size of the rare spectra is much smaller than the majority of the spectra, many traditional classifiers can’t work effectively because they only focus on the classification accuracy and have not paid enough attentions on the rare spectra. In view of this, the relationship between the decision tree and mutual information is discussed on the basis of summarizing the traditional classifiers, and the cost-free decision tree based on mutual information is proposed in this paper to improve the performance of distinguishing the rare spectra. In the experiment, we investigate the performance of the proposed method on the K-type, F-type, G-type, M-type datasets from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), Data Release 8. It can be concluded that the proposed method can complete the rare spectra distinguishing task compared with several traditional classifiers.