unityForest: Improving Interaction Modelling and Interpretability in Random
Forests
Implementation of the unity forest (UFO) framework (Hornung & Hapfelmeier, 2026,
<doi:10.48550/arXiv.2601.07003>).
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.
| Version: |
0.1.0 |
| Depends: |
R (≥ 3.5) |
| Imports: |
Rcpp (≥ 0.11.2), Matrix, ggplot2, ggrepel, dplyr, scales, rlang |
| LinkingTo: |
Rcpp, RcppEigen |
| Suggests: |
patchwork |
| Published: |
2026-01-30 |
| DOI: |
10.32614/CRAN.package.unityForest (may not be active yet) |
| 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 |
| Materials: |
NEWS |
| CRAN checks: |
unityForest results |
Documentation:
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