09. Random Forests

Many trees make a forest. Bagging gives FREE independent model assessment or parameter tuning. Random Forests have a fantastic variance - bias trade-off.

Artwork by @allison_horst.

Agenda

November 4, 2024

1. Redux - CART
2. bagging process
3. bagging error rate (OOB error)

November 6, 2024

1. Random Forests
2. Example

Readings

• Class notes: bagging

• Class notes: random forests

• Gareth, Witten, Hastie, and Tibshirani (2021), bagging & random forests (section 8.2) Introduction to Statistical Learning.

• Max Kuhn and Julia Silge (2021), Tidy Modeling with R

Reflection questions

• How does bagging improve on a single tree? How does tuning mtry (with aggregation) improve on a single tree? (That is, what advantage do forests have over single trees.)

• How do Random Forests make predictions on test data?

• Can Random Forests be used for both classification and regression or only one of the two tasks?

• Can you use categorical / character predictors with Random Forests?

• How are mtry and the number of trees chosen?

• How do the bias and variance change for different values of mtry and number of trees?

• What are the advantages of the Random Forests algorithm?

• What are the disadvantages of the Random Forest algorithm?

Ethics considerations

• What type of feature engineering is required for Random Forests?

• Do Random Forests produce a closed form “model” that can be written down or visualized and handed to a client?

• If the model produces near perfect predictions on the test data, what are some potential concerns about putting that model into production?

Slides

• In class slides - bagging & random forests for 11/4/24 and 11/6/24.

• WS14 - Bias-Variance trade-off

Additional Resources

• The end of science (???) “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete”, Science, June 23, 2008.

• Maybe not so fast. “10 things statistics taught us about big data analysis”, Jeff Leek, May 22, 2014.

• Julia Silge’s blog <a href = “https://juliasilge.com/blog/sf-trees-random-tuning/” target_“blank”>Tuning Random Forest parameters

• Julia Silge’s blog <a href = “https://juliasilge.com/blog/water-sources/” target_“blank”>Predicting water sources with Random Forests

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