A survival tree for interval-censored failure time data

Abstract

Interval-censored failure time data as a general type of survival data often arises in medicine and other applied fields. Survival tree is a flexible predictive method for survival data because no specific assumptions are required. Generalized Log-Rank Test have good power with parameters for interval-censored failure time data. We construct a special test statistic of Generalized Log-Rank Tests, and propose a new survival tree with hyper-parameter by combining the test statistic with Conditional Inference Framework for interval-censored failure time data. The effect of tuning hyper-parameter are discussed and hyper-parameter tuning allows the tree method to be more general and flexible. Thus the tree method either improve upon or remain competitive with existing tree method for interval-censored failure time data-ICtree, which is a special case of ours. An extensive simulation is executed to assess the predictive performance of our tree methods. Finally, the tree methods are applied to a tooth emergence data.

Keywords

• survival tree
• interval-censored
• conditional inference framework
• hyper-parameter tuning
• generalized log-rank tests