Package ‘tuneRanger’

April 16, 2019

Type Package
Title Tune Random Forest of the 'ranger' Package
Description Tuning random forest with one line. The package is mainly based on the pack-
ages 'ranger' and 'mlrMBO'.
Version 0.5
License GPL-3
Encoding UTF-8
Depends R (>= 3.0.2), ranger (>= 0.8.0), mlrMBO (>= 1.1.1), parallel
(>= 3.3.3), lubridate (>= 1.6.0), lhs (>= 0.14)
Imports mlr (>= 2.11), smoof (>= 1.5.1), ParamHelpers (>= 1.10),
methods (>= 3.3.3), BBmisc (>= 1.11), DiceKriging (>= 1.5.5)
LazyData yes
ByteCompile yes
Date 2019-04-16
RoxygenNote 6.1.1
Suggests survival, testthat
NeedsCompilation no
Author Philipp Probst [aut, cre],
Simon Klau [ctb]
Maintainer Philipp Probst <[email protected]>
Repository CRAN
Date/Publication 2019-04-16 16:02:58 UTC

R topics documented:
estimateTimeTuneRanger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
restartTuneRanger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
tuneMtryFast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
tuneRanger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Index 7

1
2 restartTuneRanger

estimateTimeTuneRanger
estimateTimeTuneRanger

Description
estimateTimeTuneRanger

Usage
estimateTimeTuneRanger(task, iters = 100, num.threads = 1,
num.trees = 1000, respect.unordered.factors = "order")

Arguments
task The mlr task created by makeClassifTask or makeRegrTask.
iters Number of iterations.
num.threads Number of threads. Default is 1.
num.trees Number of trees.
respect.unordered.factors
Handling of unordered factor covariates. One of ’ignore’, ’order’ and ’partition’.
’order’ is the default.

Value
estimated time for the tuning procedure

Examples
estimateTimeTuneRanger(iris.task)

restartTuneRanger restartTuneRanger

Description
Restarts the tuning process if an error occured.

Usage
restartTuneRanger(save.file.path = "optpath.RData", task,
measure = NULL)
tuneMtryFast 3

Arguments
save.file.path File name in the current working directory to which interim results were saved
by tuneRanger.
task The mlr task created by makeClassifTask or makeRegrTask.
measure Performance measure that was already used in the original tuneRanger process.

Value
A list with elements
recommended.pars
Recommended hyperparameters.
results A data.frame with all evaluated hyperparameters and performance and time re-
sults for each run.

No model is build.

Examples
## Not run:
library(tuneRanger)
library(mlr)

# iris is a bit nonsense here

# A mlr task has to be created in order to use the package
# the already existing iris task is used here
estimateTimeTuneRanger(iris.task)
# temporarily file name to save results
path = tempfile()
res = tuneRanger(iris.task, measure = list(multiclass.brier), num.trees = 1000,
num.threads = 8, iters = 70, save.file.path = path)

# Mean of best 5 % of the results

res

# Restart after failing in one of the iterations:

res = restartTuneRanger(save.file.path = path, iris.task,
measure = list(multiclass.brier))
## End(Not run)

tuneMtryFast tuneMtryFast

Description
Similar to tuneRF in randomForest but for ranger.
4 tuneMtryFast

Usage
tuneMtryFast(formula = NULL, data = NULL,
dependent.variable.name = NULL, mtryStart = floor(sqrt(ncol(data) -
1)), num.treesTry = 50, stepFactor = 2, improve = 0.05,
trace = TRUE, plot = TRUE, doBest = FALSE, ...)

Arguments
formula Object of class formula or character describing the model to fit. Interaction
terms supported only for numerical variables.
data Training data of class data.frame, matrix, dgCMatrix (Matrix) or gwaa.data
(GenABEL).
dependent.variable.name
Name of dependent variable, needed if no formula given. For survival forests
this is the time variable.
mtryStart starting value of mtry; default is the same as in ranger
num.treesTry number of trees used at the tuning step
stepFactor at each iteration, mtry is inflated (or deflated) by this value
improve the (relative) improvement in OOB error must be by this much for the search to
continue
trace whether to print the progress of the search
plot whether to plot the OOB error as function of mtry
doBest whether to run a forest using the optimal mtry found
... options to be given to ranger

Details
Provides fast tuning for the mtry hyperparameter.
Starting with the default value of mtry, search for the optimal value (with respect to Out-of-Bag
error estimate) of mtry for randomForest.

Value
If doBest=FALSE (default), it returns a matrix whose first column contains the mtry values searched,
and the second column the corresponding OOB error.
If doBest=TRUE, it returns the ranger object produced with the optimal mtry.

Examples
library(tuneRanger)

data(iris)
res <- tuneMtryFast(Species ~ ., data = iris, stepFactor = 1.5)
tuneRanger 5

tuneRanger tuneRanger

Description
Automatic tuning of random forests of the ranger package with one line of code.

Usage
tuneRanger(task, measure = NULL, iters = 70, iters.warmup = 30,
time.budget = NULL, num.threads = NULL, num.trees = 1000,
parameters = list(replace = FALSE, respect.unordered.factors =
"order"), tune.parameters = c("mtry", "min.node.size",
"sample.fraction"), save.file.path = NULL, build.final.model = TRUE,
show.info = getOption("mlrMBO.show.info", TRUE))

Arguments
task The mlr task created by makeClassifTask, makeRegrTask or makeSurvTask.
measure Performance measure to evaluate/optimize. Default is brier score for classifica-
tion and mse for regression. Can be changed to accuracy, AUC or logaritmic
loss by setting it to list(acc), list(auc) or list(logloss). Other possible
performance measures from mlr can be looked up in the mlr tutorial.
iters Number of iterations. Default is 70.
iters.warmup Number of iterations for the warmup. Default is 30.
time.budget Running time budget in seconds. Note that the actual mbo run can take more
time since the condition is checked after each iteration. The default NULL
means: There is no time budget.
num.threads Number of threads. Default is number of CPUs available.
num.trees Number of trees.
parameters Optional list of fixed named parameters that should be passed to ranger.
tune.parameters
Optional character vector of parameters that should be tuned. Default is mtry,
min.node.size and sample.fraction. Additionally replace and respect.unordered.factors
can be included in the tuning process.
save.file.path File to which interim results are saved (e.g. "optpath.RData") in the current
working directory. Default is NULL, which does not save the results. If a file
was specified and one iteration fails the algorithm can be started again with
restartTuneRanger.
build.final.model
[logical(1)]
Should the best found model be fitted on the complete dataset? Default is TRUE.
show.info Verbose mlrMBO output on console? Default is TRUE.
6 tuneRanger

Details
Model based optimization is used as tuning strategy and the three parameters min.node.size, sam-
ple.fraction and mtry are tuned at once. Out-of-bag predictions are used for evaluation, which
makes it much faster than other packages and tuning strategies that use for example 5-fold cross-
validation. Classification as well as regression is supported. The measure that should be optimized
can be chosen from the list of measures in mlr: mlr tutorial

Value
A list with elements
recommended.pars
Recommended hyperparameters.
results A data.frame with all evaluated hyperparameters and performance and time re-
sults for each run.
model The final model if build.final.model set to TRUE.

See Also
estimateTimeTuneRanger for time estimation and restartTuneRanger for continuing the algo-
rithm if there was an error.

Examples
## Not run:
library(tuneRanger)
library(mlr)

# A mlr task has to be created in order to use the package

data(iris)
iris.task = makeClassifTask(data = iris, target = "Species")

# Estimate runtime
estimateTimeTuneRanger(iris.task)
# Tuning
res = tuneRanger(iris.task, measure = list(multiclass.brier), num.trees = 1000,
num.threads = 2, iters = 70, save.file.path = NULL)

# Mean of best 5 % of the results

res
# Model with the new tuned hyperparameters
res$model
# Prediction
predict(res$model, newdata = iris[1:10,])
## End(Not run)
Index

estimateTimeTuneRanger, 2, 6

makeClassifTask, 3, 5
makeRegrTask, 3, 5
makeSurvTask, 5

randomForest, 3
ranger, 3–5
restartTuneRanger, 2, 5, 6

tuneMtryFast, 3
tuneRanger, 3, 5