Variable importance

You already know that bagged trees are an ensemble model that overcomes the variance problem of decision trees. Now you learned that the random forest algorithm further improves this by using only a random subset of the features in each tree. This further decorrelates the ensemble, improving its predictive performance.

In this exercise, you will build a random forest yourself and plot the importance of the predictors using the vip package. The training data, customers_train, is pre-loaded in your workspace.

This exercise is part of the course

Machine Learning with Tree-Based Models in R

Exercise instructions

Create spec, the specification of a random forest classification model using the "ranger" engine and "impurity" variable importance.
Create model by fitting the tibble customers_train to spec using still_customer as the outcome and all other columns as the predictor variables.
Plot the variable importance using the vip() function from the vip package (which is not pre-loaded).

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Specify a random forest
spec <- ___ %>%
	set_mode("classification") %>%
    set_engine(___, importance = ___)

# Train the forest
model <- spec %>%
    fit(___,
        ___)

# Plot the variable importance
vip::___(model)

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Machine Learning with Tree-Based Models in R

IntermediateSkill Level

4.9+

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Ready to build a real machine learning pipeline? Complete step-by-step exercises to learn how to create decision trees, split your data, and predict which patients are most likely to suffer from diabetes. Last but not least, you’ll build performance measures to assess your models and judge your predictions.

Exercise 1: Welcome to the course!Exercise 2: Why tree-based methods?Exercise 3: Specify that tree Exercise 4: Train that model Exercise 5: How to grow your tree Exercise 6: Train/test split Exercise 7: Avoiding class imbalances Exercise 8: From zero to hero Exercise 9: Predict and evaluate Exercise 10: Make predictions Exercise 11: Crack the matrix Exercise 12: Are you predicting correctly?

Ready for some candy? Use a chocolate rating dataset to build regression trees and assess their performance using suitable error measures. You’ll overcome statistical insecurities of single train/test splits by applying sweet techniques like cross-validation and then dive even deeper by mastering the bias-variance tradeoff.

Exercise 1: Continuous outcomes Exercise 2: Train a regression tree Exercise 3: Predict new values Exercise 4: Inspect model output Exercise 5: Performance metrics for regression trees Exercise 6: In-sample performance Exercise 7: Out-of-sample performance Exercise 8: Bigger mistakes, bigger penalty Exercise 9: Cross-validation Exercise 10: Create the folds Exercise 11: Fit the folds Exercise 12: Evaluate the folds Exercise 13: Bias-variance tradeoff Exercise 14: Call things by their names Exercise 15: Adjust model complexity Exercise 16: In-sample and out-of-sample performance

Time to get serious with tuning your hyperparameters and interpreting receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. In this chapter, you’ll leverage the wisdom of the crowd with ensemble models like bagging or random forests and build ensembles that forecast which credit card customers are most likely to churn.

Exercise 1: Tuning hyperparameters Exercise 2: Generate a tuning grid Exercise 3: Tune along the grid Exercise 4: Pick the winner Exercise 5: More model measures Exercise 6: Calculate specificity Exercise 7: Draw the ROC curve Exercise 8: Area under the ROC curve Exercise 9: Bagged trees Exercise 10: Create bagged trees Exercise 11: In-sample ROC and AUC Exercise 12: Check for overfitting Exercise 13: Random forest Exercise 14: Bagged trees vs. random forest Exercise 15: Variable importance

Current Exercise

Ready for the high society of tree-based models? Apply gradient boosting to create powerful ensembles that perform better than anything that you have seen or built. Learn about their fine-tuning and how to compare different models to pick a winner for production.

Exercise 1: Introduction to boosting Exercise 2: Bagging vs. boosting Exercise 3: Specify a boosted ensemble Exercise 4: Gradient boosting Exercise 5: Train a boosted ensemble Exercise 6: Evaluate the ensemble Exercise 7: Compare to a single classifier Exercise 8: Optimize the boosted ensemble Exercise 9: Tuning preparation Exercise 10: The actual tuning Exercise 11: Finalize the model Exercise 12: Model comparison Exercise 13: Compare AUC Exercise 14: Plot ROC curves Exercise 15: Wrap-up