Bootstrap Aggregating and Random Forest Tae-Hwy Lee, Aman Ullah and Ran Wang Abstract Bootstrap Aggregating (Bagging) is an ensemble technique for improving the robustness of forecasts. Random Forest is a successful method based on Bagging and Decision Trees. In this chapter, we explore Bagging, Random Forest, and their variants in various aspects of theory and practice. We also discuss applications based on these methods in economic forecasting and inference. 1 Introduction The last 30 years witnessed the dramatic developments and applications of Bag- ging and Random Forests. The core idea of Bagging is model averaging. Instead of choosing one estimator, Bagging considers a set of estimators trained on the boot- strap samples and then takes the average output of them, which is helpful in improv- ing the robustness of an estimator. In Random Forest, we grow a set of Decision Trees to construct a ‘forest’ to balance the accuracy and robustness for forecasting. This chapter is organized as follows. First, we introduce Bagging and some vari- ants. Second, we discuss Decision Trees in details. Then, we move to Random Forest which is one of the most attractive machine learning algorithms combining Decision Trees and Bagging. Finally, several economic applications of Bagging and Random Forest are discussed. As we mainly focus on the regression problems rather than classification problems, the response y is a real number, unless otherwise mentioned. Tae-Hwy Lee Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, e-mail:
[email protected] Aman Ullah Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, e-mail:
[email protected] Ran Wang Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, e-mail: ran.wang@email.