How are feature_importances in RandomForestClassifier determined?

Question

I have a classification task with a time-series as the data input, where each attribute (n=23) represents a specific point in time. Besides the absolute classification resul

Answer 1

code:

iris = datasets.load_iris()  
X = iris.data  
y = iris.target  
clf = DecisionTreeClassifier()  
clf.fit(X, y)  

decision_tree plot:
enter image description here
We get

compute_feature_importance:[0. ,0.01333333,0.06405596,0.92261071]   

Check source code:

cpdef compute_feature_importances(self, normalize=True):
    """Computes the importance of each feature (aka variable)."""
    cdef Node* left
    cdef Node* right
    cdef Node* nodes = self.nodes
    cdef Node* node = nodes
    cdef Node* end_node = node + self.node_count

    cdef double normalizer = 0.

    cdef np.ndarray[np.float64_t, ndim=1] importances
    importances = np.zeros((self.n_features,))
    cdef DOUBLE_t* importance_data = importances.data

    with nogil:
        while node != end_node:
            if node.left_child != _TREE_LEAF:
                # ... and node.right_child != _TREE_LEAF:
                left = &nodes[node.left_child]
                right = &nodes[node.right_child]

                importance_data[node.feature] += (
                    node.weighted_n_node_samples * node.impurity -
                    left.weighted_n_node_samples * left.impurity -
                    right.weighted_n_node_samples * right.impurity)
            node += 1

    importances /= nodes[0].weighted_n_node_samples

    if normalize:
        normalizer = np.sum(importances)

        if normalizer > 0.0:
            # Avoid dividing by zero (e.g., when root is pure)
            importances /= normalizer

    return importances

Try calculate the feature importance:

print("sepal length (cm)",0)
print("sepal width (cm)",(3*0.444-(0+0)))
print("petal length (cm)",(54* 0.168 - (48*0.041+6*0.444)) +(46*0.043 -(0+3*0.444)) + (3*0.444-(0+0)))
print("petal width (cm)",(150* 0.667 - (0+100*0.5)) +(100*0.5-(54*0.168+46*0.043))+(6*0.444 -(0+3*0.444)) + (48*0.041-(0+0)))

We get feature_importance: np.array([0,1.332,6.418,92.30]).

After normalized, we get array ([0., 0.01331334, 0.06414793, 0.92253873]),this is same as clf.feature_importances_.

Be careful all classes are supposed to have weight one.