The rationale behind this simplifying choice is that, to become a “standard method” that users with different (possibly non-computational) backgrounds select by default, a method should be simple to use and not require any complex human intervention (such as parameter tuning) demanding particular expertise. Our experience from statistical consulting is that applied research practitioners tend to apply methods in their simplest form for different reasons including lack of time, lack of expertise and the (critical) requirement of many applied journals to keep data analysis as simple as possible. Currently, the simplest approach consists of running RF with default parameter values, since no unified and easy-to-use tuning approach has yet established itself. It is not the goal of this paper to discuss how to improve RF’s performance by appropriate tuning strategies and which level of expertise is ideally required to use RF. We simply acknowledge that the standard variant with default values is widely used and conjecture that things will probably not dramatically change in the short term. That is why we made the choice to consider RF with default values
