Random Forest Learner

This Node Is Deprecated — This version of the node has been replaced with a new and improved version. The old version is kept for backwards-compatibility, but for all new workflows we suggest to use the version linked below.
Go to Suggested ReplacementRandom Forest Learner

Learns a random forest*, which consists of a chosen number of decision trees. Each of the decision tree models is learned on a different set of rows (records) and a different set of columns (describing attributes), whereby the latter can also be a bit-vector or byte-vector descriptor (e.g. molecular fingerprint). The row sets for each decision tree are created by bootstrapping and have the same size as the original input table. For each node of a decision tree a new set of attributes is determined by taking a random sample of size sqrt(m) where m is the total number of attributes. The output model describes a random forest and is applied in the corresponding predictor node using a simple majority vote.

This node provides a subset of the functionality of the Tree Ensemble Learner corresponding to a random forest. If you need additional functionality please check out the Tree Ensemble Learner.

Experiments have shown the results on different data sets are very similar to the random Forest implementation available in R.

The decision tree construction takes place in main memory (all data and all models are kept in memory).

The missing value handling corresponds to the method described here. The basic idea is to try for each split to send the missing values in every direction and the one yielding the best results (i.e. largest gain) is then used. If no missing values are present during training, the direction of a split that the most records are following is chosen as direction for missing values during testing.

Nominal columns are split in a binary manner. The determination of the split depends on the kind of problem:

  • For two-class classification problems the method described in section 9.4 of "Classification and Regression Trees" by Breiman et al. (1984) is used.
  • For multi-class classification problems the method described in "Partitioning Nominal Attributes in Decision Trees" by Coppersmith et al. (1999) is used.


(*) RANDOM FORESTS is a registered trademark of Minitab, LLC and is used with Minitab’s permission.

Options

Target Column
Select the column containing the value to be learned. Rows with missing values in this column will be ignored during the learning process.
Attribute Selection

Select the attributes on which the model should be learned. You can choose from two modes.

Fingerprint attribute Uses a fingerprint/vector (bit, byte and double are possible) column to learn the model by treating each entry of the vector as separate attribute (e.g. a bit vector of length 1024 is expanded into 1024 binary attributes). The node requires all vectors to be of the same length.

Column attributes Uses ordinary columns in your table (e.g. String, Double, Integer, etc.) as attributes to learn the model on. The dialog allows to select the columns manually (by moving them to the right panel) or via a wildcard/regex selection (all columns whose names match the wildcard/regex are used for learning). In case of manual selection, the behavior for new columns (i.e. that are not available at the time you configure the node) can be specified as either Enforce exclusion (new columns are excluded and therefore not used for learning) or Enforce inclusion (new columns are included and therefore used for learning).

Enable Hightlighting (#patterns to store)
If selected, the node stores the selected number of rows and allows highlighting them in the node view.
Save target distribution in tree nodes (memory expensive - only important for tree view and PMML export)
If selected, the model will store the distribution of the target category values in each tree node. This information is not relevant for the prediction but is accessible via the tree view or when exporting individual models to PMML. Enabling this option may increase memory consumption considerably.
Split Criterion
Choose the split criterion here. Gini is usually a good choice and is used in "Classification and Regression Trees" (Breiman et al, 1984) and the original random forest algorithm (as described by Breiman et al, 2001); information gain is used in C4.5; information gain ratio normalizes the standard information gain by the split entropy to overcome some unfair preference for nominal splits with many child nodes.
Limit number of levels (tree depth)
Number of tree levels to be learned. For instance, a value of 1 would only split the (single) root node (decision stump).
Minimum node size
Minimum number of records in child nodes. It can be at most half of the minimum split node size (see above). Note, this parameter is currently ignored for nominal splits.
Number of models
The number of decision trees to learn. A "reasonable" value can range from very few (say 10) to many thousands for small data sets with few target category values.
Use static random seed
Choose a seed to get reproducible results.

Input Ports

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The data to learn from. It must contain at least one nominal target column and either a fingerprint (bit-vector/byte-vector) column or another numeric or nominal column.

Output Ports

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The input data with the out-of-bag error estimates, i.e. for each input row the majority vote of all models that did not use the row in the training. If the entire data was used to train the individual models then this output will contain the input data with missing prediction and confidence values. The appended columns are equivalent to the columns appended by the corresponding predictor node. There is one additional column model count, which contains the number of models used for the voting (number of models not using the row throughout the learning.)
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A statistics table on the attributes used in the different tree learners. Each row represents one training attribute with these statistics: #splits (level x) as the number of models, which use the attribute as split on level x (with level 0 as root split); #candidates (level x) is the number of times an attribute was in the attribute sample for level x (in a random forest setup these samples differ from node to node). If no attribute sampling is used #candidates is the number of models. Note, these numbers are uncorrected, i.e. if an attribute is selected on level 0 but is also in the candidate set of level 1 (but will not be split on level 1 because it has been split one level up), the #candidate number will still count the attribute as candidate.
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The trained model.

Popular Successors

Views

Tree Views
An decision tree viewer for all the trained models. Use the spinner to iterate through the different models.

Workflows

Links

Developers

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