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Why is encoding ordinal data important for random forest? 


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Encoding ordinal data is important for random forest because it allows the algorithm to take into account the inherent ordering of the response categories. Traditional random forest methods ignore the ordering and treat the variable as either nominal or metric, which is not appropriate for ordinal data. Several papers propose novel approaches that incorporate the ordering information into the random forest framework. These approaches use permutation variable importance measures (VIMs) that explicitly consider the ordering in the response levels. Simulation studies and real data analysis show that incorporating the ordering information improves predictor rankings and prediction accuracy. These new approaches provide alternative VIMs that are specifically designed for ordinal response variables and can be used in combination with ordinal regression trees.

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The provided paper does not explicitly mention why encoding ordinal data is important for random forests.
The answer to the query is not present in the provided paper. The paper discusses the construction of ordinal trees and random forests without explicitly mentioning the importance of encoding ordinal data for random forests.
The provided paper does not mention the importance of encoding ordinal data for random forest. The paper focuses on proposing an ordinal random forest algorithm and its parallel implementation using MapReduce.
Book ChapterDOI
03 Sep 2013
3 Citations
Encoding ordinal data is important for random forest because it introduces order statistics into the splitting functions of nodes, which have been shown to have more discriminative power than single feature dimensions.
The paper does not explicitly mention why encoding ordinal data is important for random forest.

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