Evidence map›Paper›PMID 38656274›Full record

ArticleThe international journal of biostatistics2024

Random forests for survival data: which methods work best and under what conditions?

Matthew Berkowitz, Rachel MacKay Altman, Thomas M Loughin

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in The international journal of biostatistics, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Matthew BerkowitzStatistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.ORCID 0000-0002-8384-3796
Rachel MacKay AltmanStatistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.
Thomas M LoughinStatistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Few systematic comparisons of methods for constructing survival trees and forests exist in the literature. Importantly, when the goal is to predict a survival time or estimate a survival function, the optimal choice of method is unclear. We use an extensive simulation study to systematically investigate various factors that influence survival forest performance - forest construction method, censoring, sample size, distribution of the response, structure of the linear predictor, and presence of correlated or noisy covariates. In particular, we study 11 methods that have recently been proposed in the literature and identify 6 top performers. We find that all the factors that we investigate have significant impact on the methods' relative accuracy of point predictions of survival times and survival function estimates. We use our results to make recommendations for which methods to use in a given context and offer explanations for the observed differences in relative performance.

Indexed as

Models, StatisticalComputer SimulationData Interpretation, StatisticalHumansRandom ForestSurvival Analysispoint predictionrandom forestrandom survival forestsurvival analysissurvival function estimation

Identifiers

PMID38656274
PMCPMC11661562

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.