Recursive partitioning methods have become popular and widely used tools in many scientific fields. Especially random forests have been widely applied in genetics and related disciplines within the past few years. First applications in psychology show that random forests can be of use in a wide variety of applications in this field as well. With this review we hope to have given the necessary background for a successful – yet sensible – use of recursive partitioning methods, in particular of random forests, that have drawn much attention due to their applicability to even high dimensional problems.
