Problematic Random Forest training runtime when using formula interface

Question

Running the Random Forest example from http://www.kaggle.com/c/icdar2013-gender-prediction-from-handwriting/data, the following line:

forest_model <- randomFo         


        

Answer 1

Found the problem, using formula in randomForest has created a tremendous performance degradation.

More on this and how to estimate random forest running time can found in: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/37370/random-forest-computing-time-in-r and in http://www.gregorypark.org/?p=286

Here is final code:

forest_model <- randomForest(y=train$male, x=train[,-2], ntree=10000,do.trace=T)