unityForest

0.2.0

Improving Interaction Modelling and Interpretability in Random Forests

0packages depend

1.2Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Roman HornungFirst published 2026-01-302 releasesCRAN page ↗

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. Categorical and continuous outcomes are 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.

Install

R (CRAN)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("unityForest", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-unityforest

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-unityForest

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-unityForest

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 4.4 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-04-25
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-04-22
12 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-04-18
11 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-03-10
12 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 75%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 100%

Downloads

1.2K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #20,683 · ~3/day · ~98/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

21130 days

58690 days

1.2K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on202 r2u29 autocran

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

9 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5

Imports (7)

RcppMatrixggplot2 ggrepel dplyr scales rlang

LinkingTo (2)

Rcpp RcppEigen

Suggests (1)

patchwork

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

Code & Tests

People & History

People (2)

Maintainer (1)

Roman Hornung

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Roman Hornung

Author, Maintainer

Contributors (1)

Marvin N. Wright

Contributor, Copyright holder

Marvin N. Wright

Contributor, Copyright holder

Package Timeline

2 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.2.0Latest
2026-02-25 · current release · diff ↗
0.1.0
2026-01-30
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2026-01-30
Total releases: 2 / 1 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5
Bundled data: 22 KB / 2 files
Download size: 133 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Report a problem with this page →