Unbalanced classification using RandomForestClassifier in sklearn

Question

I have a dataset where the classes are unbalanced. The classes are either '1' or '0' where the ratio of class '1':'0' is 5:1. How do you calculate the prediction error for each class and the rebalance weights accordingly in sklearn with Random Forest, kind of like in the following link: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/RandomForests/cc_home.htm#balance

Answer 1

You can pass sample weights argument to Random Forest fit method

sample_weight : array-like, shape = [n_samples] or None 

Sample weights. If None, then samples are equally weighted. Splits that would create child nodes with net zero or negative weight are ignored while searching for a split in each node. In the case of classification, splits are also ignored if they would result in any single class carrying a negative weight in either child node.

In older version there were a preprocessing.balance_weights method to generate balance weights for given samples, such that classes become uniformly distributed. It is still there, in internal but still usable preprocessing._weights module, but is deprecated and will be removed in future versions. Don't know exact reasons for this.

Update

Some clarification, as you seems to be confused. sample_weight usage is straightforward, once you remember that its purpose is to balance target classes in training dataset. That is, if you have X as observations and y as classes (labels), then len(X) == len(y) == len(sample_wight), and each element of sample witght 1-d array represent weight for a corresponding (observation, label) pair. For your case, if 1 class is represented 5 times as 0 class is, and you balance classes distributions, you could use simple

sample_weight = np.array([5 if i == 0 else 1 for i in y]) 

assigning weight of 5 to all 0 instances and weight of 1 to all 1 instances. See link above for a bit more crafty balance_weights weights evaluation function.