unityForest (version 0.1.0)
Improving Interaction Modelling and Interpretability in Random
Forests
Description
Implementation of the unity forest (UFO) framework (Hornung & Hapfelmeier, 2026,
).
UFOs are a random forest variant designed to better take covariates with purely
interaction-based effects into account, including interactions for which none of the involved
covariates exhibits a marginal effect.
While this framework tends to improve discrimination and predictive accuracy compared
to standard random forests, it also facilitates the identification and interpretation of
(marginal or interactive) effects: In addition to the UFO algorithm for tree construction,
the package includes the unity variable importance measure (unity VIM), which quantifies
covariate effects under the conditions in which they are strongest - either marginally
or within subgroups defined by interactions - as well as covariate-representative tree
roots (CRTRs) that provide interpretable visualizations of these conditions.
Currently, only classification is supported.
This package is a fork of the R package 'ranger' (main author: Marvin N. Wright), which
implements random forests using an efficient C++ backend.