Measures of random forest pruning: Comparative study and experiment on diabetic monitoring

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a comparative study between 3 random forest pruning measures using simultaneously or separately performance and diversity. The measures will be used with a Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) path to reduce the number of initial trees. The methods are applied on a dataset from the UCI Repository and a diabetic monitoring application. The results allow obtaining ensembles of smaller sizes with similar or even exceeding, in some cases, performance of the initial forest with considerable improvements in the case of use of performance and diversity.