[R] RandomForest and Missing Values

nalluri pratap
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:26:55 -0000

If you wish to remove missing values, you can use the option
na.action=na.omit.If you wish to Impute you can use rfImpute.

--- On Mon, 28/1/13, Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com>
Subject: [R] RandomForest and Missing Values
To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch
Date: Monday, 28 January, 2013, 10:07 PM


Dear All,
I would like to use a randomForest algorithm on a dataset.
The set is not particularly large/difficult to handle, but it has some
missing values (both factors and numerical values).
According to what I found

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2005-September/078880.html
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2007-January/123117.html

the randomForest package has a problem with missing data (essentially
you have to resort to some "trick" to introduce them into your dataset
--a median value, the most common factor, a linear interpolation
etc...).
Seen that I could not find a clear workaround for this (but I cannot
be the only one who has in mind to do a randomForest on a less than
perfect data set), can anyone help me out?
I am concerned about the consequences of introducing the missing
values into the data set.
The cforest function in the "Party" package does not seem to have this
limitation, but on the other hand the randomForest package has passed
the test of time....so should I drop it in this case?
Any suggestion is appreciated.
Cheers

Lorenzo

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