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Recursive Partition in Biostatistics: Stability of Trees and Choice of the Most Stable Classification

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Compstat

Abstract

Structures found in data by exploratory techniques are notoriously unstable. Suppose that we search for a model within a given family and that we do this on different samples from the same population, D0, D1,..., DB. When only one data set is available, one can think of D as the original data set and the others as bootstrap samples from D0. Experience shows that one can be practically sure to find different models from different samples. A striking example of this model instability is given by Gong [1], in the context of stepwise logistic regression. The problem can be expected to be even more serious for tree-structured predictors, such as the RECPAM trees [2–4] which are the main concern of this work, since the model is selected out of a family much richer than that of linear regression as usually defined.

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References

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© 1988 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg

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Ciampi, A., Thiffault, J. (1988). Recursive Partition in Biostatistics: Stability of Trees and Choice of the Most Stable Classification. In: Edwards, D., Raun, N.E. (eds) Compstat. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46900-8_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46900-8_36

  • Publisher Name: Physica-Verlag HD

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-7908-0411-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-46900-8

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