A method and apparatus for mitigating for inter-symbol interference in a communication system using a multi-rate adaptive decision feedback equalizer (DFE) with a feedforward filter which is a combination of a first feedforward filter (FF1) that performs match filtering and a second feedforward filter (FF2) which runs at a lower sampling rate than first feedforward filter (FF1), thereby, reducing the total the number of computation done at the receiver, and removes ISI and white noise. The present invention also employs a method and apparatus where the initial training is done separately for the first feedforward filter (FF1) and the second feedforward filter (FF2). An approximate solution of the optimal receiver has the first feedforward filter (FF1) maximize the output signal to noise ratio (SNR) which is used to train first feedforward filter (FF1).