1 RANDOM FORESTS Department of Statistics（1随机森林部门的统计数据）.pdf

1 RANDOM FORESTS Leo Breiman Statistics Department University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 January 2001 Abstract Random forests are a combination of tree predictors such that each tree depends on the values of a random vector sampled independently and with the same distribution for all trees in the forest. The generalization error for forests converges a.s. to a limit as the number of trees in the forest becomes large. The generalization error of a forest of tree classifiers depends on the strength of the individual trees in the forest and the correlation between them. Using a random selection of features to split each node yields error rates that compare favorably to Adaboost (Freund and Schapire[1996]), but are more robust with respect to noise. Internal estimates monitor error, strength, and correlation and these are used to show the response to increasing the number of features used in the splitting. Internal estimates are also used to measure variable importance. These ideas are also applicable to regression. 2 1. Random Forests 1.1 Introduction Significant improvements in classification accuracy have resulted from growing an ensemble of trees and letting them vote for the most popular class. In order to grow these ensembles, often random vectors are generated that govern the growth of each tree in the ensemble. An early example is bagging (Breiman [1996]), where to grow eac