How does Random Forest split?

Random forests or random decision forests are an ensemble learning method for classification, regression, and other tasks that operate by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time and outputting the class that is the mode of the classes (classification) or mean prediction (regression) of the individual trees.

There are many Massive open online courses (MOOC) that will take directly the coding part in implementing the Random Forest Algorithm but no one will take you through the Math behind the algorithm.

Could anyone explain how does it select the node to split?

1 Answer

There are many implementations and they are different from each other.

The classic random forest is proposed by Leo Breiman, you can read his paper 'random forest' for more math details.

For R, you may check the document for rpart package:An Introduction to Recursive Partitioning Using the RPART Routines, which is used to build the trees in R randomForest package.

In chapter 3, it gives exactly how to make the split.

• Could you at least summarize the papers instead of only giving the links? Links die, in such case your answer would be useless for anyone reading it. With a summary they would at least get something from it.
– Tim
Jun 28, 2021 at 7:05