4.7 Article

A new approach for interpreting Random Forest models and its application to the biology of ageing

Journal

BIOINFORMATICS
Volume 34, Issue 14, Pages 2449-2456

Publisher

OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty087

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Leverhulme Trust [RPG-2016-015]

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Motivation: This work uses the Random Forest (RF) classification algorithm to predict if a gene is over-expressed, under-expressed or has no change in expression with age in the brain. RFs have high predictive power, and RF models can be interpreted using a feature (variable) importance measure. However, current feature importance measures evaluate a feature as a whole (all feature values). We show that, for a popular type of biological data (Gene Ontology-based), usually only one value of a feature is particularly important for classification and the interpretation of the RF model. Hence, we propose a new algorithm for identifying the most important and most informative feature values in an RF model. Results: The new feature importance measure identified highly relevant Gene Ontology terms for the aforementioned gene classification task, producing a feature ranking that is much more informative to biologists than an alternative, state-of-the-art feature importance measure.

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