caret

This blog post demonstrates that the presence of irrelevant variables can reduce the performance of the Random Forest algorithm (as implemented in R by `ranger()`). The solution is either to tune one of the algorithm's parameters, OR to remove irrelevant features using a procedure called Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE).

In this blog post, we explore how to implement the validation set approach in caret. This is the most basic form of the train/test machine learning concept.