You have to know some machine learning fundamentals to figure that out - “Random Forest” is a specific machine learning algorithm, which does not need a further explanation. To take it a step further, they should really not describe “Machine learning”, no, its not like the machine takes a book and learns, its a term.
I had the exact same reaction: biology or computers?
The only hint I can see anywhere on the page is "Statistics > Machine Learning" above the abstract title.
I really want it to be about actual biological trees being studied on the scale of forests growing with smooth edges over long periods of time, but I suspect that's not what it is about.
The tree is an incredibly common data structure in computer science. Decision trees are well known. Random forests are ubiquitous in Machine Learning. Should the authors really have to dumb their paper down so people who don’t work in this domain avoid confusing it with work in arborism?
Pretty sure the guy you’re replying to was half-joking, but adding the words ‘machine learning’ in the first sentence would have cleared this up pretty simply and wouldn’t have resulted in dumbing down anything.
