rpart vs. randomForest

"Anonymous" ==   <chumpmonkey at hushmail.com>
    on Sat, 12 Apr 2003 14:41:00 -0700 writes:

Anonymous> Greetings. I'm trying to determine whether to use
    Anonymous> rpart or randomForest for a classification
    Anonymous> tree. Has anybody tested efficacy formally? I've
    Anonymous> run both and the confusion matrix for rf beats
    Anonymous> rpart. I've looking at the rf help page and am
    Anonymous> unable to figure out how to extract the tree.
    Anonymous> But more than that I'm looking for a more
    Anonymous> comprehensive user's guide for randomForest
    Anonymous> including the benefits on using it with MDS. Can
    Anonymous> anybody suggest a general guide? I've been
    Anonymous> finding a lot of broken links and cs-type of web
    Anonymous> pages rather than an end-user's guide. Also
    Anonymous> people's experience on adjusting the mtry param
    Anonymous> would be useful. Breiman says that it isn't too
    Anonymous> sensitive but I'm curious if anybody has had a
    Anonymous> different experience with it. Thanks in advance
    Anonymous> and apologies if this is too general.


If you really read Breiman, or alternatively, remember English,
you'll know that a forest has many trees...

Regards,
Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/