How Many Trees in a Random Forest? A Revisited Approach with Plateau Search and Optuna Integration

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03549v1
• Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:10:43 GMT
• Title: How Many Trees in a Random Forest? A Revisited Approach with Plateau Search and Optuna Integration
• Abstract summary: We propose an integrated triplet-based plateau-search algorithm for HPO for Random Forest.<n>The method adaptively tracks a near-minimal sufficient ensemble size by monitoring relative changes in the out-of-bag score.<n>Experiments show that the selected number of trees can differ substantially from the common absolute.
• Score: 0.30586855806896046
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) for Random Forest faces a specific difficulty in tuning the number of trees: the predictive score typically improves monotonically with ensemble size, so standard methods such as Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) and Hyperband require a predefined search range and often drive the estimate toward its right boundary. Early-stopping strategies avoid fixing such a range, but can be sensitive to score noise and prone to premature stopping. To address this, we propose an integrated triplet-based plateau-search algorithm that removes the number of trees from the direct TPE search space and still exploits information accumulated across HPO trials. The method adaptively tracks a near-minimal sufficient ensemble size by monitoring relative changes in the out-of-bag (OOB) score across a triplet of forest sizes and shifting this triplet accordingly. This yields an automated and user-interpretable procedure based on a tolerance parameter. We also provide a theoretical analysis: we relate the proposed relative OOB-score criterion to the gap between the current and limiting scores, and derive an asymptotic variance estimate for the corresponding OOB-based absolute relative difference. Experiments show that the selected number of trees can differ substantially from the common heuristic: for most classical benchmark datasets it is smaller, whereas for some high-dimensional bioinformatics datasets, such as Arcene and Dorothea, it is larger. The source code and reproducible experiments are available at https://github.com/lange-am/rf_plateau_hpo.

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