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Bagging survival trees
Author(s) -
Hothorn Torsten,
Lausen Berthold,
Benner Axel,
RadespielTröger Martin
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.1593
Subject(s) - ha statistics
Predicted survival probability functions of censored event free survival are improved by bagging survival trees. We suggest a new method to aggregate survival trees in order to obtain better predictions for breast cancer and lymphoma patients. A set of survival trees based on B bootstrap samples is computed. We define the aggregated Kaplan–Meier curve of a new observation by the Kaplan–Meier curve of all observations identified by the B leaves containing the new observation. The integrated Brier score is used for the evaluation of predictive models. We analyse data of a large trial on node positive breast cancer patients conducted by the German Breast Cancer Study Group and a smaller ‘pilot’ study on diffuse large B‐cell lymphoma, where prognostic factors are derived from microarray expression values. In addition, simulation experiments underline the predictive power of our proposal. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.