Just a little example on how to use Decision Trees and Random Forests in Python. Basically – tress are a type of “flow-chart”, a decision tree, with nodes/edges to determine a likely outcome. Given that trees can be very difficult to predict, we can utilize Random Forests to take specific features/variables to build multiple decision trees and then average the results. This is a very very brief and vague explanation – as these posts are meant to be quick shots of how-to code and not to teach the theory behind the method. In this example we’re utilizing a small healthcare dataset that predicts if spinal surgery for an individual was successful to help a particular condition (Kyphosis). Both methods are shown to see differences in accuracy. The dataset can be found on my github here.

Check it out on github Last updated: 08/29/2021 03:36:51

Decision Trees and Random Forests - Simple Example¶

I.E. predict values based on "flow-chart" of nodes/edges¶

In this example we're utilizing a healthcare dataset that predicts if spinal surgery for an individual was successful to help a particular condition (Kyphosis).

In [1]:

#Imports
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
%matplotlib inline

In [2]:

#Read in the data
df = pd.read_csv('kyphosis.csv')

In [4]:

df.head()
#Kyphosis = Was the condition absent or present after the surgery?
#Age = Age of person in months
#Number = Number of vertebrae involved
#Start = Number of top most vertebrae operated on

Out[4]:

	Kyphosis	Age	Number	Start
0	absent	71	3	5
1	absent	158	3	14
2	present	128	4	5
3	absent	2	5	1
4	absent	1	4	15

In [29]:

df.info()
#You'll see this is a very small dataset

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 81 entries, 0 to 80
Data columns (total 4 columns):
 #   Column    Non-Null Count  Dtype 
---  ------    --------------  ----- 
 0   Kyphosis  81 non-null     object
 1   Age       81 non-null     int64 
 2   Number    81 non-null     int64 
 3   Start     81 non-null     int64 
dtypes: int64(3), object(1)
memory usage: 2.7+ KB

Decision Tree - Split data into test/train and predict¶

In [8]:

#Import splitting library
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

In [10]:

#Set X,Y
X = df.drop('Kyphosis',axis=1)
y = df['Kyphosis']

In [11]:

#Choose the test size
#Test size = % of dataset allocated for testing (.3 = 30%)
#Random state = # of random splits
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.3, random_state=101)

In [12]:

#Import library
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier

In [13]:

#Create object
dtree = DecisionTreeClassifier()

In [14]:

#Fit
dtree.fit(X_train,y_train)

Out[14]:

DecisionTreeClassifier()

In [15]:

#Predict
predictions = dtree.predict(X_test)

In [19]:

#See if the model worked, print reports (not particularly wonderful here...)
from sklearn.metrics import classification_report, confusion_matrix

In [20]:

print(confusion_matrix(y_test,predictions))

[[12  5]
 [ 6  2]]

In [21]:

print(classification_report(y_test,predictions))

              precision    recall  f1-score   support

      absent       0.67      0.71      0.69        17
     present       0.29      0.25      0.27         8

    accuracy                           0.56        25
   macro avg       0.48      0.48      0.48        25
weighted avg       0.54      0.56      0.55        25

Random Forest - Split data into test/train and predict¶

You'll notice this performs much better (in this instance) than the decision tree above

In [22]:

#Import library
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier

In [23]:

#Create object = set estimators to 200
rfc = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=200)

In [24]:

#Fit
rfc.fit(X_train,y_train)

Out[24]:

RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=200)

In [25]:

#Predict
rfc_predictions = rfc.predict(X_test)

In [27]:

#See if the model worked, print reports (MUCH better here)
print(confusion_matrix(y_test,rfc_predictions))

[[17  0]
 [ 6  2]]

In [28]:

print(classification_report(y_test,rfc_predictions))

              precision    recall  f1-score   support

      absent       0.74      1.00      0.85        17
     present       1.00      0.25      0.40         8

    accuracy                           0.76        25
   macro avg       0.87      0.62      0.62        25
weighted avg       0.82      0.76      0.71        25