MERF for classification

[MarconiS]

Hi!

I was looking for a solution to include random effect to a random forest classifier for tree species identification, and gladly found your repo. My understanding of the MERF code in merf.py, the algorithm right now can perform regression but the EM is not designed to optimize a classification problem.

If I understood it correctly, the main issue to make it happen is in identifying the equivalent of yi - f_hai_i in the context of classification (maybe using cross entropy?). Would you be interested in adding this feature to the package?

Any thought if substituting yi - f_hat_i to cross.entropy(yi, f_hat_i) would break the math of the MERF?

Thank you so much for putting this repo together,
Sergio

[MarconiS]

just realized this is issue is a clone of #11 . sorry for that! Closing right now