Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29757357›Full record

ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2018

The revival of the Gini importance?

Stefano Nembrini, Inke R König, Marvin N Wright

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 213 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
213citing papers in PubMed, 3 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

213 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.

  1. Explainable artificial intelligence for spectroscopy data: a review.Pflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology · 2025
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153 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Stefano NembriniDepartment of Epidemiology, College of Public Health and Health Professions & College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Inke R KönigInstitut für Medizinische Biometrie und Statistik, Universität zu Lübeck, Universitätsklinikum Schleswig-Holstein, Campus Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
Marvin N WrightInstitut für Medizinische Biometrie und Statistik, Universität zu Lübeck, Universitätsklinikum Schleswig-Holstein, Campus Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Motivation: Random forests are fast, flexible and represent a robust approach to analyze high dimensional data. A key advantage over alternative machine learning algorithms are variable importance measures, which can be used to identify relevant features or perform variable selection. Measures based on the impurity reduction of splits, such as the Gini importance, are popular because they are simple and fast to compute. However, they are biased in favor of variables with many possible split points and high minor allele frequency. Results: We set up a fast approach to debias impurity-based variable importance measures for classification, regression and survival forests. We show that it creates a variable importance measure which is unbiased with regard to the number of categories and minor allele frequency and almost as fast as the standard impurity importance. As a result, it is now possible to compute reliable importance estimates without the extra computing cost of permutations. Further, we combine the importance measure with a fast testing procedure, producing p-values for variable importance with almost no computational overhead to the creation of the random forest. Applications to gene expression and genome-wide association data show that the proposed method is powerful and computationally efficient. Availability and implementation: The procedure is included in the ranger package, available at https://cran.r-project.org/package=ranger and https://github.com/imbs-hl/ranger. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Indexed as

AlgorithmsGenome-Wide Association StudyGene FrequencyGenomeMachine LearningSoftware

Identifiers

PMID29757357
PMCPMC6198850

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.