# Decision Trees & Random Forests

Shan-Hung Wu & DataLab
Fall 2022

The Decision Trees and Random Forests are two versatile machine learning models that are applicable to many machine learning tasks. In this lab, we will apply them to the classification problem and the dimension reduction problem using the Wine dataset that we have being using in our last lab.

## General Machine Learning Steps¶

Before we start, let's review the general machine learning steps:

1. Data collection, preprocessing (e.g., integration, cleaning, etc.), and exploration;
• Split a dataset into the training and testing datasets
2. Model development:
1. Assume a model $\{f\}$ that is a collection of candidate functions $f$’s (representing posteriori knowledge) we want to discover. Let's assume that each $f$ is parametrized by $\boldsymbol{w}$;
2. Define a cost function $C(\boldsymbol{w})$ that measures "how good a particular $f$ can explain the training data." The lower the cost function the better;
3. Training: employ an algorithm that finds the best (or good enough) function $f^∗$ in the model that minimizes the cost function over the training dataset;
4. Testing: evaluate the performance of the learned $f^*$ using the testing dataset;
5. Apply the model in the real world.

## Decision Tree Classification¶

Now, consider a classification task defined over the Wine dataset: to predict the type (class label) of a wine (data point) based on its 13 constituents (attributes/variables/features). Followings are the steps we are going to perform:

1. Randomly split the Wine dataset into the training dataset $\mathbb{X}^{\text{train}}=\{(\boldsymbol{x}^{(i)},y^{(i)})\}_{i}$ and testing dataset $\mathbb{X}^{\text{test}}=\{(\boldsymbol{x}'^{(i)},y'^{(i)})\}_{i}$;
2. Model development:
1. Model: $\{f(x)=y\}$ where each $f$ represents a decision tree;
2. Cost function: the entropy (impurity) of class labels of data corresponding to the leaf nodes;
3. Training: to grow a tree $f^∗$ by recursively splitting the leaf nodes such that each split leads to the maximal $information$ $gain$ over the corresponding training data;
4. Testing: to calculate the prediction accuracy $$\frac{1}{\vert\mathbb{X}^{\text{test}}\vert}\Sigma_{i}1(\boldsymbol{x}'^{(i)};f^{*}(\boldsymbol{x}'^{(i)})=y'^{(i)})$$ using the testing dataset.
5. Visualize $f^∗$ so we can interpret the meaning of rules.

### Preparing Data¶

Let's prepare the training and testing datasets:

### Training¶

We have already decided our model to be the decision trees, so let's proceed to the training step. The Scikit-learn package provides the off-the-shelf implementation of various machine learning models/algorithms, including the decision trees. We can simply use it to build a decision tree for our training set:

NOTE: you are not required to standardize the data features before building a decision tree (or a random forest) because the information gain of a cutting point does not change when we scale values of an attribute.

### Testing¶

Now we have a tree. Let's apply it to our testing set to see how it performs:

We get a 96% accuracy. That's pretty good!

### Visualization¶

Decision trees are an attractive model if we care about the interpretability of a model. By visualizing a tree, we can understand how a prediction is made by breaking down a classification rule into a series of questions about the data features.

A nice feature of the DecisionTreeClassifier in Scikit-learn is that it allows us to export the decision tree as a .dot file after training, which we can visualize using the GraphViz program. This program is freely available on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. For exmaple, if you have Anaconda installed, you can get GraphViz by simply executing the following command in command line:

> conda install graphviz

After installing GraphViz, we can create the tree.dot file:

and then convert the tree.dot file into a PNG file by executing the following GraphViz command from the command line under the same directory where tree.dot resides:

> dot -Tpng tree.dot -o fig-tree.png

Here is the visualized tree:

As we can see, the criterion 'Flavanoids<=1.575' is effective in separating the data points of the first class from those of the third class. By looking into the other criteria, we also know how to separate data points of the second class from the rests.

## Random Forests¶

Random forests have gained huge popularity in applications of machine learning during the last decade due to their good classification performance, scalability, and ease of use. Intuitively, a random forest can be considered as an ensemble of decision trees. The idea behind ensemble learning is to combine weak learners to build a more robust model, a strong learner, that has a better generalization performance. The random forest algorithm can be summarized in four simple steps:

1. Randomly draw $M$ bootstrap samples from the training set with replacement;
2. Grow a decision tree from the bootstrap samples. At each node:
1. Randomly select $K$ features without replacement;
2. Split the node by finding the best cut among the selected features that maximizes the information gain;
3. Repeat the steps 1 to 2 $T$ times to get $T$ trees;
4. Aggregate the predictions made by different trees via the majority vote.

Although random forests don't offer the same level of interpretability as decision trees, a big advantage of random forests is that we don't have to worry so much about the depth of trees since the majority vote can "absorb" the noise from individual trees. Therefore, we typically don't need to prune the trees in a random forest. The only parameter that we need to care about in practice is the number of trees $T$ at step 3. Generally, the larger the number of trees, the better the performance of the random forest classifier at the expense of an increased computational cost. Another advantage is that the computational cost can be distributed to multiple cores/machines since each tree can grow independently.

### Training¶

We can build a random forest by using the RandomForestClassifier in Scikit-learn:

We get a slightly improved accuracy 98%!

NOTE: in most implementations, including the RandomForestClassifier implementation in Scikit-learn, the bootstrap sample size $M$ is equal to the number of samples $N$ in the original training set by default. For the number of features $K$ to select at each split, the default that is used in Scikit-learn (and many other implementations) is $K=\sqrt{D}$ , where $D$ is the number of features of data points.

## Computing Feature Importance¶

In addition to classification, a random forest can be used to calculate the feature importance. Using a random forest, we can measure feature importance as the averaged information gain (impurity decrease) computed from all decision trees in the forest.

From the above figure, we can see that "Flavanoids", "OD280/OD315 of diluted wines", "Proline", and "Color intensity" are the most important features to classify the Wine dataset. This may change if we choose a different number of trees $T$ in a random foreest. For example, if we set $T=10000$, then the most important feature becomes "Color intensity."

### Feature Selection¶

By discarding the unimportant features, we can reduce the dimension of data points and compress data. For example, $Z_{Forest}$ is a compressed 2-D dataset that contains only the most important two features "Flavanoids" and "OD280/OD315 of diluted wines:"

It is worth mentioning that Scikit-learn also implements a class called SelectFromModel that helps you select features based on a user-specified threshold, which is useful if we want to use the RandomForestClassifier as a feature selector. For example, we could set the threshold to 0.16 to get $Z_{Forest}$ :

## Dimension Reduction: PCA vs. Random Forest¶

So far, we have seen two dimension reduction techniques: PCA and feature selection based on Random Forest. PCA is an unsupervised dimension reduction technique since it does not require the class labels; while the latter is a supervised dimension reduction technique as the labels are used for computing the information gain for each node split. However, PCA is a feature extraction technique (as opposed to feature selection) in the sense that a reduced feature may not be identical to any of the original features. Next, let's build classifiers for the two compressed datasets $Z_{PCA}$ and $Z_{Forest}$ and compare their performance:

As we can see, the tree grown from PCA-compressed data yields the same accuracy 96% as that of the tree for uncompressed data. Furthermore, it performs much better than the tree grown from the selected features advised by a random forest. This shows that PCA, a feature extraction technique, is effective in preserving "information" in a dataset when the compressed dimension is very low (2 in this case). The same holds for the Random Forest classifiers:

### Further Visualization¶

When the data dimension is 2, we can easily plot the decision boundaries of a classifier. Let's take a look at the decision boundaries of the Decision Tree and Random Forest classifiers we have for $Z_{PCA}$ and $Z_{Forest}$. First, we define a utility function for plotting decision boundaries:

Next, we plot the decision boundaries by combining the training and testing sets deterministically:

As we can see, the decision boundaries of a decision tree are always axis-aligned. This means that if a "true" boundary is not axis-aligned, the tree needs to be very deep to approximate the boundary using the "staircase" one. We can see this from the random forests:

# Assignment¶

We try to make predition from another dataset breast cancer wisconsin. But there are too many features in this dataset. Please try to improve accuracy per feature $$\frac{\text{Accuracy}}{\text{# Features}}$$

HINT:

1. You can improve the ratio by picking out several important features.
2. The ratio can be improved from 0.03 up to 0.44.

## Requirements:¶

• Submit to eeclass with your code named Lab03_{student-id}.ipynb (e.g. Lab03_110069999.ipynb).
• The code file only contains the Assignment part.
• Remember to save the file after you rendered the output images in your notebook.