Hello,
I have been debating the best approach for my data. My research question fits into the classic framework of ordinal regression. I am investigating the most predictive features for "error severity". In short, the inspector is grading the quality of a product produced by someone else. The inspector buckets the errors into 4 categories of "error severity":
- no error
- minor error
- moderate error
- severe error
I know that ordinal regression fits this scenario. But, I have reason to believe that the relationship with predictors is highly non-linear. So, I want to consider a tree-based algorithm like random forests. The only problem is, I don't think tidymodels has support for ordinal random forests. I've looked into the "ordinalForest" package. But, haven't found much success.
Technically, my research centers around the most severe errors. So, I could recategorize my data into a binary classification. But, I want to get ideas from the community. For example, will multi-level classification work well even though it doesn't capture the inherent order of the response variable?
Thanks