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Understanding variable importances in forests of randomized trees

Open Repository and Bibliography (University of Liège)Published 5 December 2013Open access
Gilles Louppe, Louis Wehenkel, Antonio Sutera, Pierre Geurts
Citations806
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TL;DR

This work characterize the Mean Decrease Impurity (MDI) variable importances as measured by an ensemble of totally randomized trees in asymptotic sample and ensemble size conditions and shows that this MDI importance of a variable is equal to zero if and only if the variable is irrelevant.

Abstract

peer reviewed

Keywords

Computer ScienceEnvironmental Science