How to plot feature importance on x-axis and variable names on y-axis?

I wish to plot variables names on y-axis and feature importance on x-axis in Random Forest Regression. Also the variables on y-axis should be in descending order according to their feature importance on x-axis. I request you to kindly suggest me how to do it. D S Chahar

[Devendra]

I want to generate the feature importance plot similar to attached image. I request you all to please suggest me how to create it in matlab. Many thanks in advance.

Devendra

Answer 1

[dpb]

See barh and particularly <the example>. Use the second optional output from sort to get the order of the variables when you sort them to put in descending order to use with xticklabels to label the y-axis tick values. Or, you could convert to categorical variable type for the x-value (as ordinal to keep the sorted order) and will get the labels automagically.

nfacts=8;
features="f"+[0:nfacts-1].';
F=randi([20,125],size(features));
[F,ix]=sort(F);
hB=barh(F);
yticklabels(features(ix))
xlabel('F Score'), ylabel('Features')
hTxt=text(hB.YEndPoints,hB.XEndPoints," "+string(F),'horizontal','left','vertical','middle');

NOTA BENE: with the horiontal bar, the x,y postions for text() are y,x on the plot axes nomenclature; that's easy to confuse and the text doesn't show up or is somewhere bizarre.

[Devendra]

Thank you very much for helping me out. I want a small correction and request you to please suggest me how to keep the values infront of horizonatal bar upto two decimal points only. I am attaching the plot generated by your matlab code on my data.

Once again thanks a lot.

Devendra

[dpb]

"...keep the values ... up to two decimal points only"

Just replace

" "+string(F)

generating the string to write with

compose(" %0.2f",F)

compose

The olden way was with num2str

[Devendra]

Thanks a lot. It worked.

Devendra