3,312 research outputs found
Narrowing the Gap: Random Forests In Theory and In Practice
Despite widespread interest and practical use, the theoretical properties of
random forests are still not well understood. In this paper we contribute to
this understanding in two ways. We present a new theoretically tractable
variant of random regression forests and prove that our algorithm is
consistent. We also provide an empirical evaluation, comparing our algorithm
and other theoretically tractable random forest models to the random forest
algorithm used in practice. Our experiments provide insight into the relative
importance of different simplifications that theoreticians have made to obtain
tractable models for analysis.Comment: Under review by the International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML) 201
Fitting Prediction Rule Ensembles with R Package pre
Prediction rule ensembles (PREs) are sparse collections of rules, offering
highly interpretable regression and classification models. This paper presents
the R package pre, which derives PREs through the methodology of Friedman and
Popescu (2008). The implementation and functionality of package pre is
described and illustrated through application on a dataset on the prediction of
depression. Furthermore, accuracy and sparsity of PREs is compared with that of
single trees, random forest and lasso regression in four benchmark datasets.
Results indicate that pre derives ensembles with predictive accuracy comparable
to that of random forests, while using a smaller number of variables for
prediction
New statistical method identifes cytokines that distinguish stool microbiomes
Regressing an outcome or dependent variable onto a set of input or independent variables allows the analyst to measure associations between the two so that changes in the outcome can be described by and predicted by changes in the inputs. While there are many ways of doing this in classical statistics, where the dependent variable has certain properties (e.g., a scalar, survival time, count), little progress on regression where the dependent variable are microbiome taxa counts has been made that do not impose extremely strict conditions on the data. In this paper, we propose and apply a new regression model combining the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution with recursive partitioning providing a fully non-parametric regression model. This model, called DM-RPart, is applied to cytokine data and microbiome taxa count data and is applicable to any microbiome taxa count/metadata, is automatically fit, and intuitively interpretable. This is a model which can be applied to any microbiome or other compositional data and software (R package HMP) available through the R CRAN website
A Random Forests Approach to Assess Determinants of Central Bank Independence
A non-parametric efficient statistical method, Random Forests, is implemented for the selection of the determinants of Central Bank Independence (CBI) among a large database of economic, political, and institutional variables for OECD countries. It permits ranking all the determinants based on their importance in respect to the CBI and does not impose a priori assumptions on potential nonlinear relationships in the data. Collinearity issues are resolved, because correlated variables can be simultaneously considered
Decision Stream: Cultivating Deep Decision Trees
Various modifications of decision trees have been extensively used during the
past years due to their high efficiency and interpretability. Tree node
splitting based on relevant feature selection is a key step of decision tree
learning, at the same time being their major shortcoming: the recursive nodes
partitioning leads to geometric reduction of data quantity in the leaf nodes,
which causes an excessive model complexity and data overfitting. In this paper,
we present a novel architecture - a Decision Stream, - aimed to overcome this
problem. Instead of building a tree structure during the learning process, we
propose merging nodes from different branches based on their similarity that is
estimated with two-sample test statistics, which leads to generation of a deep
directed acyclic graph of decision rules that can consist of hundreds of
levels. To evaluate the proposed solution, we test it on several common machine
learning problems - credit scoring, twitter sentiment analysis, aircraft flight
control, MNIST and CIFAR image classification, synthetic data classification
and regression. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed approach
significantly outperforms the standard decision tree learning methods on both
regression and classification tasks, yielding a prediction error decrease up to
35%
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