
Understanding what is happening inside a Random Forest - pplonski86
https://github.com/MI2DataLab/randomForestExplainer
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bllguo
Interested in why information gain wasn't included as a measure of variable
importance (as far as I can tell)

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psychometry
It would be helpful if you defined "distribution of minimal depth", described
how to interpret those statistics, and why we should care about them. I tried
Googling the term to find out more, but to no avail. As a result, I couldn't
follow the rest of the vignette.

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yorwba
I don't know about Random Forests specifically, but in trees (or forests),
"depth" refers to the number of steps you need to take from the root to a
specific node.

So the "minimal depth" of a variable would be the, well, minimal "depth" of
any node in the tree that splits on that variable.

As I understand the article, this can be used to compare the importance of
different variables, since a more important variable would allow better
splits, and appear at a lower depth in the trees.

