Ensemble Random Forests as a tool for modeling rare occurrences Endangered Species Research

Relative to target species, priority conservation species occur rarely in fishery interactions, resulting in imbalanced, overdispersed data. We present Ensemble Random Forests (ERFs) as an intuitive extension of the Random Forest algorithm to handle rare event bias. Each Random Forest receives individual stratified randomly sampled training/test sets, then down-samples the majority class for each decision tree. Results are averaged across Random Forests to generate an ensemble prediction. Through simulation, we show that ERFs outperform Random Forest with and without down-sampling, as well as with the synthetic minority over-sampling technique, for highly class imbalanced to balanced datasets. Spatial covariance greatly impacts ERFs’ perceived performance, as shown through simulation and case studies. In case studies from the Hawaii deep-set longline fishery, giant manta ray Mobula birostris syn. Manta birostris and scalloped hammerhead Sphyrna lewini presence had high spatial covariance and high model test performance, while false killer whale Pseudorca crassidens had low spatial covariance and low model test performance. Overall, we find ERFs have 4 advantages: (1) reduced successive partitioning effects; (2) prediction uncertainty propagation; (3) better accounting for interacting covariates through balancing; and (4) minimization of false positives, as the majority of Random Forests within the ensemble vote correctly. As ERFs can readily mitigate rare event bias without requiring large presence sample sizes or imparting considerable balancing bias, they are likely to be a valuable tool in bycatch and species distribution modeling, as well as spatial conservation planning, especially for protected species where presence can be rare.