Hi all, I am using random forest (regression) and I am having trouble calculating the variable importance for my object (RF). Here is what I tried:
RF$importance and importance(RF) The thing is that the reported %incMSE is different between those two. I understand that the function importance() does some re-scaling and averaging of the results, but does that mean that the order of variables with respect to importance changes after that? This is what I got: > importance(RFcebus) %IncMSE IncNodePurity vbio1 28.34672 77950703 vbio4 29.34845 71261614 vbio12 43.62222 126822944 vbio15 34.47683 151702649 vmodis 19.69951 18413449 vfootprint 23.31656 67756166 vgeotopo 30.06409 55710807 vcost_slope 51.85601 210008585 vlight 0.00000 0 vaccess30 182.90648 136540782 > RFcebus$importance %IncMSE IncNodePurity vbio1 13171.572 77950703 vbio4 11617.453 71261614 vbio12 18330.536 126822944 vbio15 16786.781 151702649 vmodis 1736.843 18413449 vfootprint 10619.448 67756166 vgeotopo 8619.964 55710807 vcost_slope 25811.859 210008585 vlight 0.000 0 vaccess30 11037.952 136540782 Any suggestions would be appreciatted. Thanks, Naiara. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.