“…This linear relationship is beneficial for methods such as MLR in terms of model fitting and prediction. However, for decision tree-based models, it may limit them from achieving their best performance ( Liu et al, 2022 ; Dai et al, 2023 ). In this dataset, the independent variables showed strong correlations with each other; in particular, the correlation coefficient between keel length and LW reached 0.590, which was even higher than the correlation between breast muscle weight and most of the independent variables.…”