A Guide to Decision Trees and Random Forests

Quick Summary (TL;DR)

A Decision Tree is a simple, flowchart-like machine learning model where each internal node represents a “test” on an attribute (e.g., is age > 30?), each branch represents the outcome of the test, and each leaf node represents a class label or a continuous value. A Random Forest is a more powerful “ensemble” model that builds many individual decision trees during training and outputs the mode of the classes (for classification) or the mean prediction (for regression) of the individual trees. This approach corrects for the decision tree’s habit of overfitting to its training data.

Key Takeaways

Decision Trees are Interpretable: A key advantage of a single decision tree is that it is very easy to understand and visualize. You can literally follow the path of decisions down the tree to see how a prediction was made.
Decision Trees Tend to Overfit: A single decision tree, if grown deep enough, can learn the training data perfectly but will often fail to generalize to new, unseen data. This is called overfitting.
Random Forests Reduce Overfitting: A Random Forest is an ensemble method that builds multiple, slightly different decision trees on random subsets of the data and features. By averaging the predictions of these diverse trees, it produces a more robust and accurate model that is much less prone to overfitting.

The Solution

While a single decision tree is a powerful and intuitive model, its tendency to overfit makes it unreliable for many real-world problems. The Random Forest algorithm provides an elegant solution. It leverages the concept of the “wisdom of the crowd.” Instead of relying on a single, complex decision tree, it builds a large “forest” of simpler, decorrelated trees. Each tree gets to vote on the final prediction. This ensemble approach cancels out the individual errors and biases of the single trees, leading to a model that is not only highly accurate but also generalizes well to new data.

Implementation Steps

Here’s how you would typically implement a Random Forest model using Python’s scikit-learn library.

Import and Prepare Your Data Load your dataset and separate it into the input features (X) and the target variable (y).

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('customer_churn.csv')
X = df.drop('churned', axis=1)
y = df['churned']

Split Data into Training and Testing Sets Divide your data to train the model and evaluate its performance.

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=42)

Create and Train the Random Forest Model Instantiate the RandomForestClassifier model. Key hyperparameters to tune include n_estimators (the number of trees in the forest) and max_depth (the maximum depth of each tree).
```
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
model = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=100, max_depth=10, random_state=42)
model.fit(X_train, y_train)
```

Evaluate the Model Use the trained model to make predictions and evaluate its performance using metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall.

from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
predictions = model.predict(X_test)
accuracy = accuracy_score(y_test, predictions)
print(f"Accuracy: {accuracy}")

Common Questions

Q: How does a decision tree decide where to split the data? The algorithm chooses the split that results in the most “pure” nodes. For classification, this is often measured by Gini impurity or entropy. The goal is to find the feature and split point that best separates the classes.

Q: Can a Random Forest be used for regression? Yes. scikit-learn provides a RandomForestRegressor for regression tasks. Instead of each tree voting for a class, each tree predicts a continuous value, and the final prediction is the average of all the individual tree predictions.

Q: What is a key benefit of Random Forests besides accuracy? Random Forests can provide a measure of feature importance. By looking at how much each feature contributes to reducing impurity across all the trees in the forest, you can get a good sense of which features are the most predictive.

Tools & Resources

scikit-learn: The most popular machine learning library in Python. Its DecisionTreeClassifier and RandomForestClassifier are robust and easy to use.
StatQuest on Random Forests: A fantastic, intuitive video explanation of how Random Forests are built and how they work.
Visualizing a Decision Tree: The scikit-learn documentation provides examples of how to plot a decision tree, which is a great way to understand how it makes decisions.

Machine Learning Fundamentals

An Introduction to Machine Learning: Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning

ML Algorithms & Models

Ensemble Methods & Advanced Techniques

Model Validation & Optimization

Data Preparation & Engineering

Feature Engineering for Machine Learning

Business Applications

Customer Churn Prediction Using Machine Learning

Need Help With Implementation?

Decision Trees and Random Forests are versatile and powerful models for a wide range of business problems. Built By Dakic provides data science consulting to help you select the right algorithm, tune its hyperparameters, and build predictive models that are both accurate and interpretable. Get in touch for a free consultation.