Chunk #139 — Features and Pitfalls — Randomness and Stability

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An introduction to recursive partitioning: rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests.

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Due to these random processes, a random forest is only exactly reproducible when the random seed, a number that can be set by the user and determines the internal random number generation of the computer, is fixed. Otherwise, the results will vary between two runs of the same code. To illustrate this point, random seeds are set in the supplementary code for the application examples, whenever random sampling is involved.