2604.00517 Which Countries Punch Above Their Weight in Digital Governance? A Non-Circular Random Forest Analysis of EGDI Residuals with Feature Ablation and Cross-Validation
We present an executable workflow that explains UN E-Government Development Index (EGDI) scores using four socioeconomic indicators deliberately chosen to avoid overlap with EGDI sub-components: GDP per capita, corruption perceptions, urbanization, and government expenditure. Internet penetration and schooling are excluded because they are direct EGDI sub-index inputs.