Random Forest

Random forest (or random forests) is an ensemble classifier that consists of many decision trees and outputs the class that is the mode of the classes output by individual trees. The algorithm for inducing a random forest was developed by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler, and "Random Forests" is their trademark. The term came from random decision forests that was first proposed by Tin Kam Ho of Bell Labs in 1995. The method combines Breiman's "bagging" idea and the random selection of features, introduced independently by Ho and Amit and Geman in order to construct a collection of decision trees with controlled variation.

The selection of a random subset of features is an example of the random subspace method, which, in Ho's formulation, is a way to implement stochastic discrimination proposed by Eugene Kleinberg.