Weird implementation of a regression tree for identification of convergence clubs (see Postiglione, Benedetti & Lafratta 2010).

• _demo.R applies this approach to a simulated dataset and to the dataset discussed in and prepared by data_prep.R (for illustratory purposes).
• data_prep.R contains code to prepare the data (not included) from the Cambridge Econometrics European Regional Database.
• tree_core.R holds the main functionality and some helper functions. The main wrapper is get_nodes().
• tree_aux.R contains a variety of helper functions.
• cpp_implementation.cpp provides a C++ implementation (done via Rcpp) of a computationally intensive part of the algorithm and is sourced in tree_core.R.

Postiglione, P., Benedetti, R., & Lafratta, G. (2010). A regression tree algorithm for the identification of convergence clubs. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 54(11), 2776-2785.