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This paper presents an extension of the random forest (RF) method to the case of clustered data. The proposed ‘mixed-effects random forest’ (MERF) is implemented using a standard RF algorithm within the framework of the expectation–maximization algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed MERF method provides substantial improvements over standard RF when the random effects are non-negligible. The use of the method is illustrated to predict the first-week box office revenues of movies.
Hajjem et al. (Mon,) studied this question.