Decision trees and random forests#

Change up the machine learning models

Decision trees and random forests are popular machine learning techniques for classification and regression tasks.

A decision tree is a tree-like model where each node represents a decision based on a feature, and each branch represents an outcome of that decision. On the other hand, random forests are an ensemble of decision trees where each tree is trained on a subset of the data and a random subset of the features. They are powerful and widely used algorithms in machine learning because they can handle large datasets, deal with missing values, and provide interpretable results.

This notebook will explore decision trees and random forests in more detail and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.

How To#

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("data/housing.csv")
df.head()
longitude latitude housing_median_age total_rooms total_bedrooms population households median_income median_house_value ocean_proximity
0 -122.23 37.88 41.0 880.0 129.0 322.0 126.0 8.3252 452600.0 NEAR BAY
1 -122.22 37.86 21.0 7099.0 1106.0 2401.0 1138.0 8.3014 358500.0 NEAR BAY
2 -122.24 37.85 52.0 1467.0 190.0 496.0 177.0 7.2574 352100.0 NEAR BAY
3 -122.25 37.85 52.0 1274.0 235.0 558.0 219.0 5.6431 341300.0 NEAR BAY
4 -122.25 37.85 52.0 1627.0 280.0 565.0 259.0 3.8462 342200.0 NEAR BAY 
x_train, x_, y_train, y_ = train_test_split(df[["housing_median_age", "total_rooms", "median_income"]], 
                                                    df.median_house_value, test_size=.5)

x_val, x_test, y_val, y_test = train_test_split(x_, y_, test_size=.5)

Decision Trees#

from sklearn import preprocessing
from sklearn import tree

scaler = preprocessing.StandardScaler()
model = tree.DecisionTreeRegressor()

scaler.fit(x_train)

StandardScaler()
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model.fit(scaler.transform(x_train), y_train)

DecisionTreeRegressor()
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model.score(scaler.transform(x_val), y_val)

0.08402996853592337

Build a forest of decision trees#

from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor

rf = RandomForestRegressor()

rf.fit(x_train, y_train)

RandomForestRegressor()
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rf.score(x_train, y_train)

0.9299377126605475

rf.score(x_val, y_val)

0.5034545833527466

rf.feature_importances_

array([0.14200784, 0.19935222, 0.65863994])

Exercise#

Experiment with different machine learning models

Additional Resources#