Random forests started a revolution in machine learning 20 years ago. For the first time, there was a fast and reliable algorithm which made almost no assumptions about the form of the data, and required almost no preprocessing. In today’s lesson, you’ll learn how a random forest really works, and how to build one from scratch. And, just as importantly, you’ll learn how to interpret random forests to better understand your data.
Video
This lesson is based partly on chapter 9 of the book.
Lesson notebooks
- How random forests really work
- Road to the top, part 1
Links from the lesson
- How to explain Gradient Boosting
- “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures” by Leo Breiman