new patched version of randomForest

[Liaw, Andy]

There's now a new version of randomForest (3.3-4) on CRAN.  Changes from the
last version include:

o  "Unsupervised learning" now works again.

o  Fixed a bug in the original Fortran: the mtry variables chosen 
   to split each node are now sampled without replacement.

o  Variable importance for regression now works correctly (i.e.,
   reproducible when random seed is set).  The problem was simply
   un-initialized array.  The problem is also in the original
   Fortran code, so users of that beware!

o  A new option keep.forest (default TRUE), which, when set to FALSE,
   supresses the `forest' component of the returned object.  This
   can reduce memory usage and execution time significantly, if
   prediction of test set is not needed.

o  The default value of mtry is now set to sqrt(p) for classification
   and p/3 for regression (where p is the number of predictors), 
   consistent with Prof. Breiman's suggestion.

Questions/comments/bug-reports/patches welcomed!

Regards,
Andy
Andy I. Liaw, PhD
Biometrics Research          Phone: (732) 594-0820
Merck & Co., Inc.              Fax: (732) 594-1565
P.O. Box 2000, RY84-16            Rahway, NJ 07065
mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com




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