Chunk #85 — The Methods — Variable Importance

Source

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

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Thus, a reasonable measure for variable importance is the difference in prediction accuracy (i.e. the number of observations classified correctly; usually the out-of-bag prediction accuracy is used to compute the permutation importance) before and after permuting a variable, averaged over all trees.