We prove uniform consistency of Random Survival Forests (RSF), a newly introduced forest ensemble learner for analysis of right-censored survival data. Consistency is proven under general splitting rules, bootstrapping, and random selection of variables-that is, under true implementation of the methodology. Under this setting we show that the forest ensemble survival function converges uniforml...

The analysis of an algorithm by Koda and Ruskey for listing ideals in a forest poset leads to a study of random binary trees and their limits as infinite random binary trees. The corresponding finite and infinite random forests are studied too. The infinite random binary trees and forests studied here have exactly one infinite path; they can be defined using suitable size-biazed Galton–Watson p...

There is a large literature explaining why AdaBoost is a successful classifier. The literature on AdaBoost focuses on classifier margins and boosting's interpretation as the optimization of an exponential likelihood function. These existing explanations, however, have been pointed out to be incomplete. A random forest is another popular ensemble method for which there is substantially less expl...

Tree ensembles such as random forests and boosted trees are accurate but difficult to understand, debug and deploy. In this work, we provide the inTrees (interpretable trees) framework that extracts, measures, prunes and selects rules from a tree ensemble, and calculates frequent variable interactions. An rule-based learner, referred to as the simplified tree ensemble learner (STEL), can also b...

A novel 3-step random forests methodology involving survival data (survival forests), ordinal data (multiclass forests), and continuous data (regression forests) is introduced for cancer staging. The methodology is illustrated for esophageal cancer using worldwide esophageal cancer collaboration data involving 4627 patients.

Random forests are a very effective and commonly used statistical method, but their full theoretical analysis is still an open problem. As a first step, simplified models such as purely random forests have been introduced, in order to shed light on the good performance of random forests. In this paper, we study the approximation error (the bias) of some purely random forest models in a regressi...

This paper describes new extensions to the state-of-the-art regression random forests Quantile Regression Forests (QRF) for applications to high dimensional data with thousands of features. We propose a new subspace sampling method that randomly samples a subset of features from two separate feature sets, one containing important features and the other one containing less important features. Th...

Ensemble learning techniques and in particular Random Forests have been one of the most successful machine learning approaches of the last decade. Despite their success, there exist barely suitable visualizations of Random Forests, which allow a fast and accurate understanding of how well they perform a certain task and what leads to this performance. This paper proposes an exemplar-driven visu...

The development of lidar system, especially incorporated with high-resolution camera components, has shown great potential for urban classification. However, how to automatically select the best features for land-use classification is challenging. Random Forests, a newly developed machine learning algorithm, is receiving considerable attention in the field of image classification and pattern re...