Classic Machine Learning Through the Eyes of an SRE — Part 3
The random forest is the first ML algorithm that made me feel at home. Not because of the math — because it's an SRE idea wearing a stats costume.
Many independent workers. No single point of failure. Majority vote. If one worker goes weird, the fleet absorbs it. We've been building systems this way for decades; the forest just applies it to prediction.
The problem it exists to fix
Last article: a single decision tree is readable but unstable — small data change, whole tree flips, explanation rewrites itself. That instability is variance, and it's exactly what scared me about trusting one tree in production.
