Friday, August 12, 2016

Random Forest Regression, Negative Variance Explained mechanism

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Jeffery Evans, Senior Landscape Ecologist, The Nature Conservancy, Global Lands Science Team, Affiliate Assistant Professor, Zoology & Physiology, University of Wyoming explains a negative percent variance explained in a random forest regression in hilarious way -

I have recently been asked the question: “why do I receive a negative percent variance explained in a random forest regression”. Besides the obvious answer “because your model is crap” I thought that I would explain the mechanism at work here so the assumption is not that randomForests is producing erroneous results. For poorly supported models it is, in fact, possible to receive a negative percent variance explained.

Generally, explained variance (R²) is defined as:

R² = 1 - sum((ลท-mean(y))²) / sum((mean(y)-y)²)

However, as indicated by Breiman (2001) and the R randomForest documentation the (regression only) “pseudo R-squared” is derived as:

R² = 1 – (mean squared error) / var(y)

Which, mathematically can produce negative values. A simple interpretation of a negative R² (rsq), is that you are better off predicting any given sample as equal to overall estimated mean, indicating very poor model performance. 
 

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