Survival Trees

Survival trees are a useful regression tool to model the relationship between a survival time and a set of covariates. Survival or censored data are particularly common in medical research, and they also arise from many different areas of scientific and clinical research. For example, in the social sciences, we may be interested in the school drop-out rates and the turnover in a labor market. Tree based methods, due to their nonparametric nature and flexibility, have become very popular in the last two decades as an alternative to the traditional proportional hazard model. In this chapter we present the XploRe stree quantlet in the XploRequantlib hazreg Grund and Yang (2000, Chapter 5), which represent the XploRe implementation of the methodology decribed by Zhang (1995) and Zhang and Singer (1999).