Precision Medicine: Interaction Survival Tree for Recurrent Event Data
Volume 22, Issue 2 (2024): Special Issue: 2023 Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS): “Inquire, Investigate, Implement, Innovate”, pp. 298–313
Pub. online: 17 April 2024
Type: Statistical Data Science
Open Access
Open Access
Received
1 August 2023
1 August 2023
Accepted
15 March 2024
15 March 2024
Published
17 April 2024
17 April 2024
Abstract
In randomized controlled trials, individual subjects experiencing recurrent events may display heterogeneous treatment effects. That is, certain subjects might experience beneficial effects, while others might observe negligible improvements or even encounter detrimental effects. To identify subgroups with heterogeneous treatment effects, an interaction survival tree approach is developed in this paper. The Classification and Regression Tree (CART) methodology (Breiman et al., 1984) is inherited to recursively partition the data into subsets that show the greatest interaction with the treatment. The heterogeneity of treatment effects is assessed through Cox’s proportional hazards model, with a frailty term to account for the correlation among recurrent events on each subject. A simulation study is conducted for evaluating the performance of the proposed method. Additionally, the method is applied to identify subgroups from a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study for chronic granulomatous disease. R implementation code is publicly available on GitHub at the following URL: https://github.com/xgsu/IT-Frailty.
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