Interval censored recursive forests

J Comput Graph Stat. 2022;31(2):390-402. doi: 10.1080/10618600.2021.1987253. Epub 2021 Nov 17.

Abstract

We propose interval censored recursive forests (ICRF), an iterative tree ensemble method for interval censored survival data. This nonparametric regression estimator addresses the splitting bias problem of existing tree-based methods and iteratively updates survival estimates in a self-consistent manner. Consistent splitting rules are developed for interval censored data, convergence is monitored using out-of-bag samples, and kernel-smoothing is applied. The ICRF is uniformly consistent and displays high prediction accuracy in both simulations and applications to avalanche and national mortality data. An R package icrf is available on CRAN and Supplementary Materials for this article are available online.

Keywords: interval censored data; kernel-smoothing; quasi-honesty; random forest; self-consistency; survival analysis.