R: Reading Skills

readingSkills {party} | R Documentation

## Reading Skills

### Description

A toy data set illustrating the spurious correlation between reading skills and shoe size in school-children.

### Usage

    data("readingSkills")

### Format

A data frame with 200 observations on the following 4 variables.

`nativeSpeaker`

  a factor with levels `no` and `yes`, where `yes` indicates that the child is a native speaker of the language of the reading test.

`age`

  age of the child in years.

`shoeSize`

  shoe size of the child in cm.

`score`

  raw score on the reading test.

### Details

In this artificial data set, that was generated by means of a linear model, `age` and `nativeSpeaker` are actual predictors of the `score`, while the spurious correlation between `score` and `shoeSize` is merely caused by the fact that both depend on `age`.

The true predictors can be identified, e.g., by means of partial correlations, standardized beta coefficients in linear models or the conditional random forest variable importance, but not by means of the standard random forest variable importance (see example).

### Examples

       set.seed(290875)
       readingSkills.cf <- cforest(score ~ ., data = readingSkills,
           control = cforest_unbiased(mtry = 2, ntree = 50))

       # standard importance
       varimp(readingSkills.cf)
       # the same modulo random variation
       varimp(readingSkills.cf, pre1.0_0 = TRUE)

       # conditional importance, may take a while...
       varimp(readingSkills.cf, conditional = TRUE)

[Package party version 1.3-7 Index]