Ensemble Classification Methods with Applications in R

4 Classification with Individual and Ensemble Trees in R

Esteban Alfaro Matías Gámez and Noelia García

4.1 Introduction

To apply the methods collected in this manual the R programming environment is used (R Development Core Team, 2017), consisting of a set of packages or libraries for data manipulation, calculation, and graphics. Among other features, it has a well‐developed and effective programming language (R language), it is considered by the researcher community to be one of the most powerful tools to implement statistical methods or, in a more general sense, to do any data analysis, it is an open source programming language with a wide and very active community contributing to its development, and, of course, it is freely distributed, which ensures that it can be used not only by supported researchers but by students all over the world.

Specifically, for practical applications version R 3.4.0 (April 2017) has been used, although updates of this program occur very frequently, therefore there is no doubt that by the time this work sees the light there will have been more updated versions. Some statistical techniques are included in the base package of R and others are available in the form of libraries (packages) on the Internet in CRAN (http://www.r‐project.org). These libraries collect a set of functions that have a series of parameters that can be adjusted and whose meaning can be found through the help function that each library has.

Among the libraries available ...