thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

AI & Machine Learning · Intermediate

Random Forest

An ensemble of decision trees trained on random data samples and feature subsets, averaging their predictions.

Definition

Random forests use bagging plus random feature selection at each split to build many decorrelated trees, then vote (classification) or average (regression). This reduces variance and overfitting compared with a single tree. They provide feature importance scores and work well on tabular data with little tuning.

Exam tip

Random forest is bagging of trees; it reduces variance, while boosting reduces bias.

Related terms