R: RandomForest regression learner.

regr.randomForest {mlr} | R Documentation

## RandomForest regression learner.

### Description

mlr learner for regression tasks using randomForest::randomForest.

This doc page exists, as we added additional uncertainty estimation functionality (`predict.type = "se"`) for the randomForest, which is not provided by the underlying package.

Currently implemented methods are:

- If `se.method = "jackknife"` the standard error of a prediction is estimated by computing the jackknife-after-bootstrap, the mean-squared difference between the prediction made by only using trees which did not contain said observation and the ensemble prediction.

- If `se.method = "bootstrap"` the standard error of a prediction is estimated by bootstrapping the random forest, where the number of bootstrap replicates and the number of trees in the ensemble are controlled by `se.boot` and `se.ntree` respectively, and then taking the standard deviation of the bootstrap predictions. The "brute force" bootstrap is executed when `ntree = se.ntree`, the latter of which controls the number of trees in the individual random forests which are bootstrapped. The "noisy bootstrap" is executed when `se.ntree < ntree` which is less computationally expensive. A Monte-Carlo bias correction may make the latter option prefarable in many cases. Defaults are `se.boot = 50` and `se.ntree = 100`.

- If `se.method = "sd"`, the default, the standard deviation of the predictions across trees is returned as the variance estimate. This can be computed quickly but is also a very naive estimator.

For both “jackknife” and “bootstrap”, a Monte-Carlo bias correction is applied and, in the case that this results in a negative variance estimate, the values are truncated at 0.

Note that when using the “jackknife” procedure for se estimation, using a small number of trees can lead to training data observations that are never out-of-bag. The current implementation ignores these observations, but in the original definition, the resulting se estimation would be undefined.

Please note that all of the mentioned `se.method` variants do not affect the computation of the posterior mean “response” value. This is always the same as from the underlying randomForest.

### References

Joseph Sexton and Petter Laake; Standard errors for bagged and random forest estimators, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis Volume 53, 2009, 801-811. Also see: Stefan Wager, Trevor Hastie, and Bradley Efron; Confidence Intervals for Random Forests: The Jackknife and the Infinitesimal Jackknife, Journal of Machine Learning Research Volume 15, 2014, 1625-1651.

[Package mlr version 2.12.1 Index]