Fig. 1

Variable Importance (VIMP) plot for Mathematics (left panel) and Slovak language (right panel), derived from their respective Random Forest Regression (RFR) models. In each panel, the predictors (independent variables) are displayed along the y-axis, ranked according to their importance in predicting the outcome variable. The importance of each predictor is quantified using the VIMP metric, which is shown on the x-axis. Higher VIMP values indicate greater importance in the predictive model