How to improve random Forest performance?

Optimizing hyperparameters for machine learning models is a key step in making accurate predictions. Hyperparameters define characteristics of the model that can impact model accuracy and computational efficiency. They are typically set prior to fitting the model to the data. In contrast, parameters are values estimated during the training process that allow the model to fit the data. Hyperparameters are often optimized through trial and error; multiple models are fit with a variety of hyperparameter values, and their performance is compared. For random forest algorithms, one can manipulate a variety of key attributes that define model structure.

Instead of only comparing XGBoost and Random Forest in this post we will try to explain how to use those two very popular approaches with Bayesian Optimisation and that are those models main pros and cons. XGBoost (XGB) and Random Forest (RF) both are ensemble learning methods and predict (classification or regression) by combining the outputs from individual decision trees (we assume tree-based XGB or RF). XGBoost build decision tree one each time. Each new tree corrects errors which were made by previously trained decision tree. At Addepto we use XGBoost models to solve anomaly detection problems e.g. in supervised learning approach.

Privacy has raised considerable concerns recently, especially with the advent of information explosion and numerous data mining techniques to explore the information inside large volumes of data. In this context, a new distributed learning paradigm termed federated learning becomes prominent recently to tackle the privacy issues in distributed learning, where only learning models will be transmitted from the distributed nodes to servers without revealing users' own data and hence protecting the privacy of users. In this paper, we propose a horizontal federated XGBoost algorithm to solve the federated anomaly detection problem, where the anomaly detection aims to identify abnormalities from extremely unbalanced datasets and can be considered as a special classification problem. Our proposed federated XGBoost algorithm incorporates data aggregation and sparse federated update processes to balance the tradeoff between privacy and learning performance. In particular, we introduce the virtual data sample by aggregating a group of users' data together at a single distributed node. We compute parameters based on these virtual data samples in the local nodes and aggregate the learning model in the central server. In the learning model upgrading process, we focus more on the wrongly classified data before in the virtual sample and hence to generate sparse learning model parameters. By carefully controlling the size of these groups of samples, we can achieve a tradeoff between privacy and learning performance. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme by comparing with existing state-of-the-arts.

The'functional needs repair' category of the target variable only makes up about 7% of the whole set. The implication is that whatever algorithm you end up using it's probably going to learn the other two balanced classes a lot better than this one. Such is data science: the struggle is real. The first thing we're going to do is create an'age' variable for the waterpoints as that seems highly relevant. The'population' variable also has a highly right-skewed distribution so we're going to change that as well: The zeros inside of the'amount_tsh' are also probably NaNs so we're going to do something drastic and simplify it into 0s and 1s: One of the most important points we learned from the week before and something that will stay with me is the idea of coming up with a baseline model as fast as one can.

We propose a new framework of XGBoost that predicts the entire conditional distribution of a univariate response variable. In particular, XGBoostLSS models all moments of a parametric distribution, i.e., mean, location, scale and shape (LSS), instead of the conditional mean only. Choosing from a wide range of continuous, discrete and mixed discrete-continuous distribution, modelling and predicting the entire conditional distribution greatly enhances the flexibility of XGBoost, as it allows to gain additional insight into the data generating process, as well as to create probabilistic forecasts from which prediction intervals and quantiles of interest can be derived. We present both a simulation study and real world examples that demonstrate the benefits of our approach.

Geodesic distance is the shortest path between two points in a Riemannian manifold. Manifold learning algorithms, such as Isomap, seek to learn a manifold that preserves geodesic distances. However, such methods operate on the ambient dimensionality, and are therefore fragile to noise dimensions. We developed an unsupervised random forest method (URerF) to approximately learn geodesic distances in linear and nonlinear manifolds with noise. URerF operates on low-dimensional sparse linear combinations of features, rather than the full observed dimensionality. To choose the optimal split in a computationally efficient fashion, we developed a fast Bayesian Information Criterion statistic for Gaussian mixture models. We introduce geodesic precision-recall curves which quantify performance relative to the true latent manifold. Empirical results on simulated and real data demonstrate that URerF is robust to high-dimensional noise, where as other methods, such as Isomap, UMAP, and FLANN, quickly deteriorate in such settings. In particular, URerF is able to estimate geodesic distances on a real connectome dataset better than other approaches.

Understanding how "black-box" models arrive at their predictions has sparked significant interest from both within and outside the AI community. Our work focuses on doing this by generating local explanations about individual predictions for tree-based ensembles, specifically Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs). Given a correctly predicted instance in the training set, we wish to generate a counterfactual explanation for this instance, that is, the minimal perturbation of this instance such that the prediction flips to the opposite class. Most existing methods for counterfactual explanations are (1) model-agnostic, so they do not take into account the structure of the original model, and/or (2) involve building a surrogate model on top of the original model, which is not guaranteed to represent the original model accurately. There exists a method specifically for random forests; we wish to extend this method for GBDTs. This involves accounting for (1) the sequential dependency between trees and (2) training on the negative gradients instead of the original labels.

The modelDown package turns classification or regression models into HTML static websites. With one command you can convert one or more models into a website with visual and tabular model summaries. So it's model agnostic (feel free to combine random forest with glm), easy to extend and parameterise. Here you can browse an example website automatically created for 4 classification models (random forest, gradient boosting, support vector machines, k-nearest neighbours). The R code beyond this example is here.

Tree ensembles such as Random Forests have achieved impressive empirical success across a wide variety of applications. To understand how these models make predictions, people routinely turn to feature importance measures calculated from tree ensembles. It has long been known that Mean Decrease Impurity (MDI), one of the most widely used measures of feature importance, incorrectly assigns high importance to noisy features, leading to systematic bias in feature selection. In this paper, we address the feature selection bias of MDI from both theoretical and methodological perspectives. Based on the original definition of MDI by Breiman et al. [3] for a single tree, we derive a tight non-asymptotic bound on the expected bias of MDI importance of noisy features, showing that deep trees have higher (expected) feature selection bias than shallow ones. However, it is not clear how to reduce the bias of MDI using its existing analytical expression. We derive a new analytical expression for MDI, and based on this new expression, we are able to propose a debiased MDI feature importance measure using out-of-bag samples, called MDI-oob. For both the simulated data and a genomic ChIP dataset, MDI-oob achieves state-of-the-art performance in feature selection from Random Forests for both deep and shallow trees.