End-to-End Random Forest Regression Pipeline with Scikit-Learn

Regression is a technique in statistics and machine learning, in which the value of an independent variable is predicted by its relationship with other variables.

Frameworks like Scikit-Learn make it easier than ever to perform regression with a wide variety of models - one of the strongest ones being built on the Random Forest algorithm.

If you'd like to read an in-depth guide to Random Forests, read our "Random Forest Algorithm with Python and Scikit-Learn"!

Using Scikit-Learn pipelines, you can build an end-to-end pipeline, load a dataset, perform feature scaling and and supply the data into a regression model in as little as 4 lines of code:

from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline

X, y = datasets.fetch_california_housing(return_X_y=True)
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y)

pipeline = Pipeline([('scaler', MinMaxScaler()), ('regressor', RandomForestRegressor())])
pipeline.fit(X_train, y_train)

r2 = pipeline.score(X_test, y_test)
print(f"RFR: {r2}") # RFR: 0.811299774049597

Alternatively, you can separate the steps outside of the pipeline, which is a bit more verbose, yet more flexible:

X, y = datasets.fetch_california_housing(return_X_y=True)
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y)

scaler = MinMaxScaler()
X_train_scaled = scaler.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test_scaled = scaler.transform(X_test)

rfr = ensemble.RandomForestRegressor().fit(X_train_scaled, y_train)

r2 = rfr.score(X_test_scaled, y_test)
print(f"RFR: {r2}") # RFR: 0.8039270852048439