Synopsis
This book describes the recursive partitioning methodology and demonstrates its effectiveness as a response to the challenge of analyzing and interpreting multiple complex pathways to many illnesses, diseases, and ultimately death. For comparison purposes, standard regression methods are presented briefly and they are applied in the examples. We emphasize particularly the importance of scientific judgment and interpretation while guided by statistical output. This book is suitable for three broad groups of readers: 1) Biomedical researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners including epidemiologists, health service researchers, environmental policy advisers; 2) Consulting statisticians who can use the recursive partitioning technique as a guide in providing effective and insightful solutions to clients' problems; and 3) Statisticians interested in methodological and theoretical issues. The book provides an up-to-date summary of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of recursive partitioning. It also presents a host of unsolved problems whose solutions whould advance the rigorous underpinnings of statistics in general. Heping Zhang is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Child Study at Yale University. In addition to the methodology and application of recursive partitioning, he is interested in developing statistical methods for analyzing correlated data, especially family and genetic studies, and brain imaging problems. Burton Singer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests include combinatorial formulation of randomness, infectious disease epidemiology, and bio-demography of aging.
From the Back Cover
The routes to many important outcomes including diseases and ultimately death as well as financial credit consist of multiple complex pathways containing interrelated events and conditions. We have historically lacked effective methodologies for identifying these pathways and their non-linear and interacting features. This book focuses on recursive partitioning strategies as a response to the challenge of pathway characterization. A highlight of the second edition is the many worked examples, most of them from epidemiology, bioinformatics, molecular genetics, physiology, social demography, banking, and marketing. The statistical issues, conceptual and computational, are not only treated in detail in the context of important scientific questions, but also an array of substantively-driven judgments are explicitly integrated in the presentation of examples. Going considerably beyond the standard treatments of recursive partitioning that focus on pathway representations via single trees, this second edition has entirely new material devoted to forests from predictive and interpretive perspectives. For contexts where identification of factors contributing to outcomes is a central issue, both random and deterministic forest generation methods are introduced via examples in genetics and epidemiology. The trees in deterministic forests are reproducible and more easily interpretable than the components of random forests. Also new in the second edition is an extensive treatment of survival forests and post-market evaluation of treatment effectiveness. Heping Zhang is Professor of Public Health, Statistics, and Child Study, and director of the Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science, at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lecturer Awarded by Harvard School of Public Health, and a Medallion lecturer selected by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Burton Singer is Courtesy Professor in the Emerging Pathogens Institute at University of Florida, and previously Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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