What is a variable importances?
A set of scores that indicates the relative importance of each feature to the model.
variable importances explained in plain English
A set of scores that indicates the relative importance of each feature to the model. For example, consider a decision tree that estimates house prices. Suppose this decision tree uses three features: size, age, and style. If a set of variable importances for the three features are calculated to be {size=5.8, age=2.5, style=4.7}, then size is more important to the decision tree than age or style. Different variable importance metrics exist, which can inform ML experts about different aspects of models.
Example
Practitioners refer to variable importances when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.
People also read
- A/B testing
A statistical way of comparing two (or more) techniques—the A and the B.
- ablation
A technique for evaluating the importance of a feature or component by temporarily removing it from a model.
- accuracy
The number of correct classification predictions divided by the total number of predictions.
- activation function
A function that enables neural networks to learn nonlinear (complex) relationships between features and the label.
- active learning
A training approach in which the algorithm chooses some of the data it learns from.
- adaptation
Synonym for tuning or fine-tuning.
- agglomerative clustering
See hierarchical clustering.
- anomaly detection
The process of identifying outliers.
- area under the PR curve
See PR AUC (Area under the PR Curve).
- area under the ROC curve
See AUC (Area under the ROC curve).