Random Forest - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

• Random forests have been observed to overfit for some datasets with noisy classification/regression tasks.
• Unlike decision trees, the classifications made by random forests are difficult for humans to interpret.

• For data including categorical variables with different number of levels, random forests are biased in favor of those attributes with more levels. Therefore, the variable importance scores from random forest are not reliable for this type of data. Methods such as partial permutations were used to solve the problem.,
• If the data contain groups of correlated features of similar relevance for the output, then smaller groups are favored over larger groups