Title
On oblique random forests
Abstract
In his original paper on random forests, Breiman proposed two different decision tree ensembles: one generated from "orthogonal" trees with thresholds on individual features in every split, and one from "oblique" trees separating the feature space by randomly oriented hyperplanes. In spite of a rising interest in the random forest framework, however, ensembles built from orthogonal trees (RF) have gained most, if not all, attention so far. In the present work we propose to employ "oblique" random forests (oRF) built from multivariate trees which explicitly learn optimal split directions at internal nodes using linear discriminative models, rather than using random coefficients as the original oRF. This oRF outperforms RF, as well as other classifiers, on nearly all data sets but those with discrete factorial features. Learned node models perform distinctively better than random splits. An oRF feature importance score shows to be preferable over standard RF feature importance scores such as Gini or permutation importance. The topology of the oRF decision space appears to be smoother and better adapted to the data, resulting in improved generalization performance. Overall, the oRF propose here may be preferred over standard RF on most learning tasks involving numerical and spectral data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/978-3-642-23783-6_29
ECML/PKDD
Keywords
Field
DocType
orf decision space,random forest framework,orf feature importance score,random split,random coefficient,original orf,standard rf feature importance,oblique random forest,standard rf,random forest
Decision tree,Oblique case,Feature vector,Pattern recognition,Permutation,Artificial intelligence,Hyperplane,Random forest,Discriminative model,Decision boundary,Mathematics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6912
0302-9743
29
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.40
29
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bjoern H. Menze1103280.31
B. Michael Kelm225515.41
Daniel N. Splitthoff3291.40
Ullrich Koethe41196.01
Fred A. Hamprecht596276.24