Casting Random Forests as Artificial Neural Networks (and Profiting from It)

While Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are highly expressive models, they are hard to train from limited data. Formalizing a connection between Random Forests (RFs) and ANNs allows exploiting the former to initialize the latter. Further parameter optimization within the ANN framework yields models that are intermediate between RF and ANN, and achieve performance better than RF and ANN on the majority of the UCI datasets used for benchmarking.