Department seminar by Liqun Diao, University of Waterloo

Thursday, February 6, 2020 10:00 am - 10:00 am EST (GMT -05:00)

Censoring Unbiased Regression Trees and Ensembles

Tree-based methods are useful tools to identify risk groups and conduct prediction by employing recursive partitioning to separate subjects into different risk groups. We propose a novel paradigm of building regression trees for censored data in survival analysis. We prudently construct the censored-data loss function through an extension of the theory of censoring unbiased transformations. With the construction, we can conveniently implement the proposed regression trees algorithm using existing software for the Classification and Regression Trees algorithm (e.g., rpart package in R) and extend it for ensemble learning. Simulations and real data examples demonstrate that our methods either improve upon or remain competitive with existing tree-based algorithms for censored data.