High Performance Computing via Improvement of Random Forest Algorithm Using Compression and Parallelization Techniques

This research seeks to promote one of the widely being used algorithms in machine learning, known as the random forest algorithm. For this purpose, we use compression and parallelization techniques. The main challenge we address in this research is about application of the random forest algorithm in processing and analyzing big data. In such cases, this algorithm does not show the usual and required performance, due to the needed large number of memory access. This research demonstrates how we can achieve the desired goal by using an innovative compression method, along with parallelization techniques. In this regard, the same components of the trees in the random forest are combined and shared. Also, a vectorization-based parallelization approach, along with a shared-memory-based parallelization method, are used in the processing phase. In order to evaluate its performance, we run it on the Kaggle benchmarks, which are being used widely in machine learning competitions. The experimental results show that contribution of the proposed compression method, could reduce 61% of the required processing time; meanwhile, application of the compression along with the named parallelization methods could lead to about 95% of improvement. Overall, this research implies that the proposed solution can provide an effective step toward high performance computing.