Block Forests: Random Forests for Blocks of Clinical and Omics Covariate Data
Overview
A random forest variant 'block forest' ('BlockForest') tailored to the prediction of binary, survival and continuous outcomes using block-structured covariate data, for example, clinical covariates plus measurements of a certain omics data type or multi-omics data, that is, data for which measurements of different types of omics data and/or clinical data for each patient exist. Examples of different omics data types include gene expression measurements, mutation data and copy number variation measurements. Block forest are presented in Hornung & Wright (2019). The package includes four other random forest variants for multi-omics data: 'RandomBlock', 'BlockVarSel', 'VarProb', and 'SplitWeights'. These were also considered in Hornung & Wright (2019), but performed worse than block forest in their comparison study based on 20 real multi-omics data sets. Therefore, we recommend to use block forest ('BlockForest') in applications. The other random forest variants can, however, be consulted for academic purposes, for example, in the context of further methodological developments. Reference: Hornung, R. & Wright, M. N. (2019) Block Forests: random forests for blocks of clinical and omics covariate data. BMC Bioinformatics 20:358. doi:10.1186/s12859-019-2942-y.
Install
Health
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- NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
- OK12 OK2026-04-25
- NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-04-22
- ERROR11 OK, 2 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-04-18
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- NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-03-10
Documentation
- Help pages
- 8
- Examples that run
- 100%4 run in a plain check
- Exported functions with examples
- 60%
- Documented parameters
- 100%
- Return-value docs
- 100%
- Help pages citing references
- 38%
Downloads
Repository
- PRs merged (all time)
- 100%
- Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues
- 1,057
- Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs
- 0
Stars over time
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5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 2 families in the upstream repository
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Dependencies
Code & Tests
People & History
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- RR 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
- 0.2.7Latest
- RR 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
- RR 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
- RR 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
- 0.2.62023-03-31 · diff ↗
- 0.2.52022-10-20 · diff ↗
- RR 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
- RR 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
- RR 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
- 0.2.42019-12-06 · diff ↗
- 0.2.32019-07-03 · diff ↗
- RR 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
- 0.2.02019-04-10 · diff ↗
- 0.1.72018-12-30
- RR 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
Package metadata
- First published
- 2018-12-30
- Total releases
- 7 / 8 yrs
- License
- GPL-3 OSI
- Minimum R
- ≥ 3.1
- Download size
- 134 KB
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