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rfImpute

Missing Value Imputations by randomForest


Description

Impute missing values in predictor data using proximity from randomForest.

Usage

## Default S3 method:
rfImpute(x, y, iter=5, ntree=300, ...)
## S3 method for class 'formula'
rfImpute(x, data, ..., subset)

Arguments

x

A data frame or matrix of predictors, some containing NAs, or a formula.

y

Response vector (NA's not allowed).

data

A data frame containing the predictors and response.

iter

Number of iterations to run the imputation.

ntree

Number of trees to grow in each iteration of randomForest.

...

Other arguments to be passed to randomForest.

subset

A logical vector indicating which observations to use.

Details

The algorithm starts by imputing NAs using na.roughfix. Then randomForest is called with the completed data. The proximity matrix from the randomForest is used to update the imputation of the NAs. For continuous predictors, the imputed value is the weighted average of the non-missing obervations, where the weights are the proximities. For categorical predictors, the imputed value is the category with the largest average proximity. This process is iterated iter times.

Note: Imputation has not (yet) been implemented for the unsupervised case. Also, Breiman (2003) notes that the OOB estimate of error from randomForest tend to be optimistic when run on the data matrix with imputed values.

Value

A data frame or matrix containing the completed data matrix, where NAs are imputed using proximity from randomForest. The first column contains the response.

Author(s)

Andy Liaw

References

Leo Breiman (2003). Manual for Setting Up, Using, and Understanding Random Forest V4.0. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/Using_random_forests_v4.0.pdf

See Also

Examples

data(iris)
iris.na <- iris
set.seed(111)
## artificially drop some data values.
for (i in 1:4) iris.na[sample(150, sample(20)), i] <- NA
set.seed(222)
iris.imputed <- rfImpute(Species ~ ., iris.na)
set.seed(333)
iris.rf <- randomForest(Species ~ ., iris.imputed)
print(iris.rf)

randomForest

Breiman and Cutler's Random Forests for Classification and Regression

v4.6-14
GPL (>= 2)
Authors
Fortran original by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler, R port by Andy Liaw and Matthew Wiener.
Initial release
2018-03-22

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