Journal of Data Science

Abstract: Scientific interest often centers on characterizing the effect of one or more variables on an outcome. While data mining approaches such as random forests are flexible alternatives to conventional parametric models, they suffer from a lack of interpretability because variable effects are not quantified in a substantively meaningful way. In this paper we describe a method for quantifying variable effects using partial dependence, which produces an estimate that can be interpreted as the effect on the response for a one unit change in the predictor, while averaging over the effects of all other variables. Most importantly, the approach avoids problems related to model misspecification and challenges to implementation in high dimensional settings encountered with other approaches (e.g., multiple linear regression). We propose and evaluate through simulation a method for constructing a point estimate of this effect size. We also propose and evaluate interval estimates based on a non-parametric bootstrap. The method is illustrated on data used for the prediction of the age of abalone.

Ensemble techniques have been gaining strength among machine learning models, considering supervised tasks, due to their great predictive capacity when compared with some traditional approaches. The random forest is considered to be one of the off-the-shelf algorithms due to its flexibility and robust performance to both regression and classification tasks. In this paper, the random machines method is applied over simulated data sets and benchmarking datasets in order to be compared with the consolidated random forest models. The results from simulated models show that the random machines method has a better predictive performance than random forest in most of the investigated data sets. Three real data situations demonstrate that the random machines may be used to solve real-world problems with competitive payoff.

Improvement of statistical learning models to increase efficiency in solving classification or regression problems is a goal pursued by the scientific community. Particularly, the support vector machine model has become one of the most successful algorithms for this task. Despite the strong predictive capacity from the support vector approach, its performance relies on the selection of hyperparameters of the model, such as the kernel function that will be used. The traditional procedures to decide which kernel function will be used are computationally expensive, in general, becoming infeasible for certain datasets. In this paper, we proposed a novel framework to deal with the kernel function selection called Random Machines. The results improved accuracy and reduced computational time, evaluated over simulation scenarios, and real-data benchmarking.