I am using the RandomForest
R package and am confused at how to interpret the values of the Y-axis in their partial dependence plots. Help docs state that the plot is a "graphical depiction of the marginal effect of a variable on the class probability." However, I am still confused as to what exactly the y-axis represents.
- Particularly, what do the negative values mean?
- What does it mean to have a negative influence on accurately predicting the class?
- And what is the most important feature from these figures, is it the max value, the shape of the trend etc?
- Can you compare the partial plots with partial plots of other variables?
- How might these plots compare with response curves created in Maxent (a distribution modeling software)?