By using random forests, we trade a rigorous reconstruction of the chemical environment for bypassing the iterative process of computing additional XANES spectra. Evaluation of a random forest model will in general be orders of magnitude faster than a full multiple scattering calculation. While coordination, Bader charge, and nearest-neighbor distances do not always fully characterize the environment around the absorbing atom, they provide useful insights into structure-property relationships , and reduce the number of candidates necessary for complete local structure determination. At their current accuracies and efficiencies, models developed within this work could be used as a pre-processing step into these more rigorous workflows -those involving FEFF, MXAN, or Pyfitit -to narrow down initial guesses for a chemical structure when no a priori structure knowledge is available .