Emerging Topics Community: Return to Trees, Part 3: Random Forest
SOA Podcasts - Society of Actuaries
English - April 10, 2024 12:00 - 31 minutes - 28.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 25 ratingsCareers Business Education soa actuaries actuary society Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Health Section: Actuaries Discuss Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
Building on the discussion of individual decision trees in the prior episode, Shea and Anders shift to one of today’s most popular ensemble models, the Random Forest. At first glance, the algorithm may seem like a brute force approach of simply running hundreds or thousands of decision trees, but it leverages the concept of “bagging” to avoid overfitting and attempt to learn as much as possible from the entire data sets, not just a few key features. We close by covering strengths and weaknesses of this model and providing some real-life examples.