# Random forest

The random forest algorithm seeks to improve on the performance of a single decision tree by taking the average of many trees. Thus, a random forest can be viewed as an **ensemble** method, or model averaging approach.  

Random forests are 
- **random** because each tree is a bagged sample _and_ because only a subset of all predictors (the **mtry** hyperparameter) are used as candidates at each split (not all predictors like single decision trees)
  - This reduced number of predictor candi