Presents a unified, efficient model of random decision forests which can be used in a number of applications such as scene recognition from photographs, object recognition in images, automatic diagnosis from radiological scans and document analysis.

This practical and easy-to-follow text explores the theoretical underpinnings of decision forests, organizing the vast existing literature on the field within a new, general-purpose forest model. Topics and features: with a foreword by Prof. Y. Amit and Prof. D. Geman, recounting their participation in the development of decision forests; introduces a flexible decision forest model, capable of addressing a large and diverse set of image and video analysis tasks; investigates both the theoretical foundations and the practical implementation of decision forests; discusses the use of decision forests for such tasks as classification, regression, density estimation, manifold learning, active learning and semi-supervised classification; includes exercises and experiments throughout the text, with solutions, slides, demo videos and other supplementary material provided at an associated website; provides a free, user-friendly software library, enabling the reader to experiment with forests in a hands-on manner.

If you want to learn how decision trees and random forests work, plus create your own, this visual book is for you. The fact is, decision tree and random forest algorithms are powerful and likely touch your life everyday. From online search to product development and credit scoring, both types of algorithms are at work behind the scenes in many modern applications and services. They are also used in countless industries such as medicine, manufacturing and finance to help companies make better decisions and reduce risk. Whether coded or scratched out by hand, both algorithms are powerful tools that can make a significant impact. This book is a visual introduction for beginners that unpacks the fundamentals of decision trees and random forests. If you want to dig into the basics with a visual twist plus create your own algorithms in Python, this book is for you.

Decision Methods for Forest Resource Management focuses on decision making for forests that are managed for both ecological and economic objectives. The essential modern decision methods used in the scientific management of forests are described using basic algebra, computer spreadsheets, and numerous examples and applications. Balanced treatment is given throughout the book to the ecological and economic impacts of alternative management decisions in both even-aged and uneven-aged forests. In-depth coverage of both ecological and economic issues Hands-on examples with Excel spreadsheets; electronic versions available on the authors' website Many related exercises with solutions Instructor's Manual available upon request

Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining; it is the science of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. Decision tree learning continues to evolve over time. Existing methods are constantly being improved and new methods introduced.This 2nd Edition is dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining; to cover all aspects of this important technique, as well as improved or new methods and techniques developed after the publication of our first edition. In this new edition, all chapters have been revised and new topics brought in. New topics include Cost-Sensitive Active Learning, Learning with Uncertain and Imbalanced Data, Using Decision Trees beyond Classification Tasks, Privacy Preserving Decision Tree Learning, Lessons Learned from Comparative Studies, and Learning Decision Trees for Big Data. A walk-through guide to existing open-source data mining software is also included in this edition.This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

In this practical book, four Cloudera data scientists present a set of self-contained patterns for performing large-scale data analysis with Spark. The authors bring Spark, statistical methods, and real-world data sets together to teach you how to approach analytics problems by example. You’ll start with an introduction to Spark and its ecosystem, and then dive into patterns that apply common techniques—classification, collaborative filtering, and anomaly detection among others—to fields such as genomics, security, and finance. If you have an entry-level understanding of machine learning and statistics, and you program in Java, Python, or Scala, you’ll find these patterns useful for working on your own data applications. Patterns include: Recommending music and the Audioscrobbler data set Predicting forest cover with decision trees Anomaly detection in network traffic with K-means clustering Understanding Wikipedia with Latent Semantic Analysis Analyzing co-occurrence networks with GraphX Geospatial and temporal data analysis on the New York City Taxi Trips data Estimating financial risk through Monte Carlo simulation Analyzing genomics data and the BDG project Analyzing neuroimaging data with PySpark and Thunder

"Learn how to use decision trees and random forests for classification and regression, their respective limitations, and how the algorithms that build them work. Each chapter introduces a new data concern and then walks you through modifying the code, thus building the engine just-in-time. Along the way you will gain experience making decision trees and random forests work for you."--Back cover.