Fig. 1

Feature Importance in Tax Model. This bar chart illustrates the relative importance of various features used in the Tax model to predict postoperative length of stay (LOS) for pleural empyema patients."Sex"has the highest influence, followed by"Creatinine,""Chloride,"and other clinical and demographic factors. These importance scores were calculated using the reduction in prediction error attributable to each feature, highlighting the most impactful variables in the model's decision-making process