Random forest facts for kids

A Random Forest is a smart computer program that helps sort and understand large amounts of information. Imagine you have a huge pile of different toys. This program helps group similar toys together. It's especially useful when there's a lot of information and many different things to consider. It can even guess how likely it is for a piece of information to belong to a certain group.

How Random Forests Work

Let's see how this clever program sorts information.

• First, the program takes a small part of all the information. This is like a practice set.
• Then, it starts grouping the information into smaller and smaller piles. If you drew lines between these piles, it would look like a tree with branches. This is called a decision tree.
  • At each point where the information splits, the program randomly picks some features to decide if pieces of information are similar.
• The program doesn't just make one tree; it makes many different trees. This collection of trees is called a "forest." Each tree is unique because it uses different random features to make its splits.
• Next, the program uses the rest of the information (the part it didn't use for practice). It checks which tree in the forest does the best job at sorting this new information correctly.
• Finally, the program shows you the tree that was best at sorting and predicting.

Using a Random Forest

When you use a random forest program, you can choose how many trees it should grow. You can also pick how many features it should look at when it splits the information. For example, you might tell it to grow 500 trees and look at 71 features at each split.

Images for kids

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  Diagram of a random decision forest

See also

In Spanish: Random forest para niños