There are many methods of scoring the importance variables in prediction a response but not much is known about their accuracy. This paper partially fills gap by introducing new method based on GUIDE algorithm and comparing it with 11 existing methods. For data without missing values, eight shown to give biased scores that too high or low, depending type (ordinal, binary nominal) whether they d...

Consider a sports competition in which participants alternately perform a scored task (such as the distance a discus is thrown), and a list of the top m scores is updated throughout. We consider the average number and distribution of records among the top m throughout and at the end of the competition. We also answer questions concerning the number of times the list changes, when each change oc...