Trees, forests, chickens, and eggs: when and why to prune trees in a random forest

Abstract Due to their long‐standing reputation as excellent off‐the‐shelf predictors, random forests (RFs) continue to remain a go‐to model of choice for applied statisticians and data scientists. Despite their widespread use, however, until recently, little was known about their inner workings and about which aspects of the procedure were driving their success. Very recently, two competing hypotheses have emerged–one based on interpolation and the other based on regularization. This work argues in favor of the latter by utilizing the regularization framework to reexamine the decades‐old question of whether individual trees in an ensemble ought to be pruned. Despite the fact that default constructions of RFs use near full depth trees in most popular software packages, here we provide strong evidence that tree depth should be seen as a natural form of regularization across the entire procedure. In particular, our work suggests that RFs with shallow trees are advantageous when the signal‐to‐noise ratio in the data is low. In building up this argument, we also critique the newly popular notion of “double descent” in RFs by drawing parallels to U ‐statistics and arguing that the noticeable jumps in random forest accuracy are the result of simple averaging rather than interpolation.