diversityForest: Innovative Complex Split Procedures in Random Forests Through Candidate Split Sampling

Implementation of three methods based on the diversity forest (DF) algorithm (Hornung, 2022, <doi:10.1007/s42979-021-00920-1>), a split-finding approach that enables complex split procedures in random forests. The package includes: 1. Interaction forests (IFs) (Hornung & Boulesteix, 2022, <doi:10.1016/j.csda.2022.107460>): Model quantitative and qualitative interaction effects using bivariable splitting. Come with the Effect Importance Measure (EIM), which can be used to identify variable pairs that have well-interpretable quantitative and qualitative interaction effects with high predictive relevance. 2. Two random forest-based variable importance measures (VIMs) for multi-class outcomes: the class-focused VIM, which ranks covariates by their ability to distinguish individual outcome classes from the others, and the discriminatory VIM, which measures overall covariate influence irrespective of class-specific relevance. 3. The basic form of diversity forests that uses conventional univariable, binary splitting (Hornung, 2022). Except for the multi-class VIMs, all methods support categorical, metric, and survival outcomes. The package includes visualization tools for interpreting the identified covariate effects. Built as a fork of the 'ranger' R package (main author: Marvin N. Wright), which implements random forests using an efficient C++ implementation.

Version: 0.6.0
Depends: R (≥ 3.5)
Imports: Rcpp (≥ 0.11.2), Matrix, ggplot2, ggpubr, scales, nnet, sgeostat, rms, MapGAM, gam, rlang, grDevices, RColorBrewer, RcppEigen, survival, patchwork
LinkingTo: Rcpp, RcppEigen
Suggests: testthat, BOLTSSIRR
Published: 2025-05-05
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.diversityForest
Author: Roman Hornung [aut, cre], Marvin N. Wright [ctb, cph]
Maintainer: Roman Hornung <hornung at ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de>
License: GPL-3
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: C++17
Additional_repositories: https://romanhornung.github.io/drat
Materials: NEWS
CRAN checks: diversityForest results

Documentation:

Reference manual: diversityForest.pdf

Downloads:

Package source: diversityForest_0.6.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: diversityForest_0.6.0.zip, r-release: diversityForest_0.5.0.zip, r-oldrel: diversityForest_0.5.0.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): diversityForest_0.6.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): diversityForest_0.6.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): diversityForest_0.6.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): diversityForest_0.6.0.tgz
Old sources: diversityForest archive

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