This monograph will be an essential reference for statistical researchers and practitioners in the health sciences. The book presents new nonparametric results with many important applications.

Klappentext

A demonstration of the recursive partitioning methodology and its effectiveness as a response to the challenge of analysing and interpreting multiple complex pathways to many illnesses, diseases, and ultimately death. For comparison purposes, standard regression methods are presented briefly and then applied in the examples. This book is suitable for three broad groups of readers: biomedical researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners including epidemiologists, health service researchers, and environmental policy advisers; consulting statisticians who can use the recursive partitioning technique as a guide in providing effective and insightful solutions to clients'problems; and statisticians interested in methodological and theoretical issues. The book provides an up-to-date summary of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of recursive partitioning, as well as a host of unsolved problems the solutions of which would advance the rigorous underpinnings of statistics in general.

Inhalt

1 Introduction.- 2 A Practical Guide to Tree Construction.- 3 Logistic Regression.- 4 Classification Trees for a Binary Response.- 5 Risk-Factor Analysis Using Tree-Based Stratification.- 6 Analysis of Censored Data: Examples.- 7 Analysis of Censored Data: Concepts and Classical Methods.- 8 Analysis of Censored Data: Survival Trees.- 9 Regression Trees and Adaptive Splines for a Continuous Response.- 10 Analysis of Longitudinal Data.- 11 Analysis of Multiple Discrete Responses.- 12 Appendix.- References.