Comments on: "A Random Forest Guided Tour" by G. Biau and E. Scornet

This paper is a comment on the survey paper by Biau and Scornet (2016) about random forests. We focus on the problem of quantifying the impact of each ingredient of random forests on their performance. We show that such a quantification is possible for a simple pure forest, leading to conclusions that could apply more generally. Then, we consider "holdout" random forests, which are a good middle point between "toy" pure forests and Breiman's original random forests. We would like to thank G. Biau and E. Scornet for their clear and thought-provoking survey (Biau and Scornet, 2016).