How to obtain Brier Score in Random Forest in R? - r

Question

I am having trouble getting the Brier Score for my Machine Learning Predictive models. The outcome "y" was categorical (1 or 0). Predictors are a mix of continuous and categorical variables.
I have created four models with different predictors, I will call them "model_1"-"model_4" here (except predictors, other parameters are the same). Example code of my model is:
Model_1=rfsrc(y~ ., data=TrainTest, ntree=1000,
mtry=30, nodesize=1, nsplit=1,
na.action="na.impute", nimpute=3,seed=10,
importance=T)
When I run the "Model_1" function in R, I got the results:
My question was how can I get the predicted possibility for those 412 people? And how to find the observed probability for each person? Do I need to calculate by hand? I found the function BrierScore() in "DescTools" package.
But I tried "BrierScore(Model_1)", it gives me no results.
codes I added:
library(scoring)
library(DescTools)
BrierScore(Raw_SB)
class(TrainTest$VL_supress03)
TrainTest$VL_supress03_nu<-as.numeric(as.character(TrainTest$VL_supress03))
class(TrainTest$VL_supress03_nu)
prediction_Raw_SB = predict(Raw_SB, TrainTest)
BrierScore(prediction_Raw_SB, as.numeric(TrainTest$VL_supress03) - 1)
BrierScore(prediction_Raw_SB, as.numeric(as.character(TrainTest$VL_supress03)) - 1)
BrierScore(prediction_Raw_SB, TrainTest$VL_supress03_nu - 1)
I tried some codes: have so many error messages:

Answer 1

One assumption I am making about your approach is that you want to compute the BrierScore on the data you train your model on (which is usually not the correct approach, google train-test split if you need more info there).
In general, therefore you should reflect on whether your approach is correct there.
The BrierScore method in DescTools only has a defined method for glm models, otherwise, it expects as input a vector of predicted probabilities and a vector of true values (see ?BrierScore).
What you would need to do though is to predict on your data using:
prediction = predict(model_1, TrainTest, na.action="na.impute")
and then compute the brier score using
BrierScore(as.numeric(TrainTest$y) - 1, prediction$predicted[, 1L])
(Note, that we transform TrainTest$y into a numeric vector of 0's and 1's in order to compute the brier score.)
Note: The randomForestSRC package also prints a normalized brier score when you call print(prediction).
In general, using one of the available workbenches for machine learning in R (mlr3, tidymodels, caret) might simplify this approach for you and prevent a lot of errors in this direction. This is a really good practice, especially if you are less experienced in ML as it can prevent many errors.
See e.g. this chapter in the mlr3 book for more information.
For reference, here is some very similar code using the mlr3 package, automatically also taking care of train-test splits.
data(breast, package = "randomForestSRC") # with target variable "status"
library(mlr3)
library(mlr3extralearners)
task = TaskClassif$new(id = "breast", backend = breast, target = "status")
algo = lrn("classif.rfsrc", na.action = "na.impute", predict_type = "prob")
resample(task, algo, rsmp("holdout", ratio = 0.8))$score(msr("classif.bbrier"))