- Extreme Gradient Boosting: A quick and reliable regressor and classifier
- Summary: LightGBM is faster and better though XGBoost is close
In this post, I’ll discuss random forests, another popular approach for feature ranking.
Random forest feature importance
Random forests are among the most popular machine learning methods thanks to their relatively good accuracy, robustness and ease of use. They also provide two straightforward methods for feature selection: mean decrease impurity and mean decrease accuracy.
Variable importance measures for random forests have been receiving increased attention as a means of variable selection in many classification tasks in bioinformatics and related scientific fields, for instance to select a subset of genetic markers relevant for the prediction of a certain disease. We show that random forest variable importance measures are a sensible means for variable selection in many applications, but are not reliable in situations where potential predictor variables vary in their scale of measurement or their number of categories. This is particularly important in genomics and computational biology, where predictors often include variables of different types, for example when predictors include both sequence data and continuous variables such as folding energy, or when amino acid sequence data show different numbers of categories.
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