randomForest: Numeric deviation between 32/64 Windows builds
Dear R Developers I'm using the great randomForest package (4.6-7) for many projects and recently stumbled upon a problem when I wrote unit tests for one of my projects: On Windows, there are small numeric deviations when using the 32- / 64-bit version of R, which doesn't seem to be a problem on Linux or Mac. R64 on Windows produces the same results as R64/R32 on Linux or Mac:
set.seed(131) importance(randomForest(Species ~ ., data=iris))
MeanDecreaseGini Sepal.Length 9.452470 Sepal.Width 2.037092 Petal.Length 43.603071 Petal.Width 44.116904 R32 on Windows produces the following:
set.seed(131) importance(randomForest(Species ~ ., data=iris))
MeanDecreaseGini Sepal.Length 9.433986 Sepal.Width 2.249871 Petal.Length 43.594159 Petal.Width 43.941870 Is there a reason why this is different for the Windows builds? Are the compilers on Windows doing different things for 32- / 64-bit builds than the ones on Linux or Mac? Thank you very much for your help. Best regards, George