Assessing feature importance with random forests
In previous sections, you learned how to use L1 regularization to zero out irrelevant features via logistic regression and how to use the SBS algorithm for feature selection and apply it to a KNN algorithm. Another useful approach for selecting relevant features from a dataset is using a random forest, an ensemble technique that was introduced in Chapter 3, A Tour of Machine Learning Classifiers Using scikit-learn. Using a random forest, we can measure the feature importance as the averaged impurity decrease computed from all decision trees in the forest, without making any assumptions about whether our data is linearly separable or not. Conveniently, the random forest implementation in scikit-learn already collects the feature importance values for us so that we can access them via the feature_importances_ attribute after fitting a RandomForestClassifier. By executing the following code, we will now train a forest of 500 trees on the...
