In the Random Forest paper they describe a nice way of measuring a variable importance - take your validation data, measure error rate, permute the variable and re-measure error rate.
Question - why is that method specific to Random Forests? I understand that in other classifiers (SVM, LR, etc.) we don't have the concept of OOB, but we certainly can use a regular train-validation split.
What am I missing here? Why isn't this method a common practice?