Epistasis Blog

From the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (www.epistasis.org)

Thursday, July 30, 2020

treeheatr: an R package for interpretable decision tree visualizations

Le TT, Moore JH. treeheatr: an R package for interpretable decision tree visualizations. Bioinformatics. 2020 Jul 23:btaa662. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa662. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 32702108. [PubMed] [Bioinformatics]
Abstract
Summary: treeheatr is an R package for creating interpretable decision tree visualizations with the data represented as a heatmap at the tree's leaf nodes. The integrated presentation of the tree structure along with an overview of the data efficiently illustrates how the tree nodes split up the feature space and how well the tree model performs. This visualization can also be examined in depth to uncover the correlation structure in the data and importance of each feature in predicting the outcome. Implemented in an easily installed package with a detailed vignette, treeheatr can be a useful teaching tool to enhance students' understanding of a simple decision tree model before diving into more complex tree-based machine learning methods.
Availability: The treeheatr package is freely available under the permissive MIT license at https://trang1618.github.io/treeheatr and https://cran.r-project.org/package=treeheatr. It comes with a detailed vignette that is automatically built with GitHub Actions continuous integration.
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.