Random Forest – Is Preprocessing Needed Before Using FinalModel with Caret Package

caretpredictionrrandom forest

I use the caret package for training a randomForest object with 10x10CV. 

library(caret)
tc <- trainControl("repeatedcv", number=10, repeats=10, classProbs=TRUE, savePred=T) 
RFFit <- train(Defect ~., data=trainingSet, method="rf", trControl=tc, preProc=c("center", "scale"))

After that, I test the randomForest on a testSet (new data)

RF.testSet$Prediction <- predict(RFFit, newdata=testSet)

The confusion matrix shows me, that the model isn't that bad.

confusionMatrix(data=RF.testSet$Prediction, RF.testSet$Defect)
              Reference
    Prediction   0   1
             0 886 179
             1  53 126  

      Accuracy : 0.8135          
             95% CI : (0.7907, 0.8348)
No Information Rate : 0.7548          
P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 4.369e-07       

              Kappa : 0.4145

I now want to test the $finalModel and I think it should give me the same result, but somehow I receive

> RF.testSet$Prediction <- predict(RFFit$finalModel, newdata=RF.testSet)
>  confusionMatrix(data=RF.testSet$Prediction, RF.testSet$Defect)
Confusion Matrix and Statistics

          Reference
Prediction   0   1
         0 323  66
         1 616 239

               Accuracy : 0.4518          
                 95% CI : (0.4239, 0.4799)
    No Information Rate : 0.7548          
    P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 1               

                  Kappa : 0.0793

What am I missing?

edit @topepo :

I also learned another randomForest without the preProcessed option and got another result:

RFFit2 <- train(Defect ~., data=trainingSet, method="rf", trControl=tc)
testSet$Prediction2 <- predict(RFFit2, newdata=testSet)
confusionMatrix(data=testSet$Prediction2, testSet$Defect)

Confusion Matrix and Statistics

          Reference
Prediction   0   1
         0 878 174
         1  61 131

               Accuracy : 0.8111          
                 95% CI : (0.7882, 0.8325)
    No Information Rate : 0.7548          
    P-Value [Acc > NIR] : 1.252e-06       

                  Kappa : 0.4167

Best Answer

The difference is the pre-processing. predict.train automatically centers and scales the new data (since you asked for that) while predict.randomForest takes whatever it is given. Since the tree splits are based on the processed values, the predictions will be off.

Max

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