How to know whether to perform any preprocessing or not?

201202010
201202010 New Altair Community Member
edited November 2024 in Community Q&A
Do we have to perform pre-processing when using Random Forest?
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Answers

  • MartinLiebig
    MartinLiebig
    Altair Employee
    Hi,
    well.. The short answer here is: no.

    One of the coolest thing for Random Forests is, that they can basically handle all kind of data and also have some "built-in feature selection". Thus you can just throw data on it and get reasonable results. The only exception for this are date attributes, which you should preprocess (e.g. Day of the Week).

    Now the longer answer: The right preprocessing can get you better results. While Random Forests are easy-care algorithms, you can still do things. One problem could be feature generation to get around XOR-Problems. The new Auto-Model feature for automatic feature generation, which is part of the 9.1 (Beta) can help here.

    BR,
    Martin
  • rfuentealba
    rfuentealba New Altair Community Member
    Hi @201202010,

    I agree with @mschmitz: You don't have to. Nevertheless, I would pass only the features I want to use to my algorithm, and remove the correlated attributes.
  • Telcontar120
    Telcontar120 New Altair Community Member
    Also, if you are not necessarily going to use Random Forest, then other algorithms will benefit from or require preprocessing.  So it is a helpful step to perform as part of your EDA, especially, handling missings, outliers, etc.

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