Calibrating Random Forests

When using the output of classifiers to calculate the expected utility of different alternatives in decision situations, the correctness of predicted class probabilities may be of crucial importance. However, even very accurate classifiers may output class probabilities of rather poor quality. One way of overcoming this problem is by means of calibration, i.e., mapping the original class probabilities to more accurate ones. Previous studies have however indicated that random forests are difficult to calibrate by standard calibration methods. In this work, a novel calibration method is introduced, which is based on a recent finding that probabilities predicted by forests of classification trees have a lower squared error compared to those predicted by forests of probability estimation trees (PETs). The novel calibration method is compared to the two standard methods, Platt scaling and isotonic regression, on 34 datasets from the UCI repository. The experiment shows that random forests ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICMLA
• Authors: Henrik Boström
• Keywords: Class Probabilities, ICMLA 2008, Machine Learning, Predicted Class Probabilities, Random Forests