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arXiv · 1703.05430

Cost-complexity pruning of random forests

Kiran Bangalore Ravi·Jean Serra
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Abstract

Random forests perform bootstrap-aggregation by sampling the training samples with replacement. This enables the evaluation of out-of-bag error which serves as a internal cross-validation mechanism. Our motivation lies in using the unsampled training samples to improve each decision tree in the ensemble. We study the effect of using the out-of-bag samples to improve the generalization error first of the decision trees and second the random forest by post-pruning. A preliminary empirical study on four UCI repository datasets show consistent decrease in the size of the forests without considerable loss in accuracy.

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Kiran Bangalore Ravi, Jean Serra. 2017-03-15. Cost-complexity pruning of random forests. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05430

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