Recursive Partitioning and Applications (Statistics for Biology and Health) [Hardcover]

Heping Zhang (Author), Burton H. Singer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0387986715 | ISBN-13: 978-0387986715 | Publication Date: March 30, 1999 | Edition: 1

This book describes the recursive partitioning methodology and demonstrates its effectiveness as a response to the challenge of analyzing and interpreting multiple complex pathways to many illnesses, diseases, and ultimately death. For comparison purposes, standard regression methods are presented briefly and they are applied in the examples. We emphasize particularly the importance of scientific judgment and interpretation while guided by statistical output. This book is suitable for three broad groups of readers: 1) Biomedical researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners including epidemiologists, health service researchers, environmental policy advisers; 2) Consulting statisticians who can use the recursive partitioning technique as a guide in providing effective and insightful solutions to clients' problems; and 3) Statisticians interested in methodological and theoretical issues. The book provides an up-to-date summary of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of recursive partitioning. It also presents a host of unsolved problems whose solutions whould advance the rigorous underpinnings of statistics in general. Heping Zhang is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Child Study at Yale University. In addition to the methodology and application of recursive partitioning, he is interested in developing statistical methods for analyzing correlated data, especially family and genetic studies, and brain imaging problems. Burton Singer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests include combinatorial formulation of randomness, infectious disease epidemiology, and bio-demography of aging.

Editorial Reviews

Review

STATISTICAL METHODS IN MEDICAL RESEARCH

"The beauty of the Zhang and Singer’s book is that it gives an excellent comparison between conventional regression models and recursive partitioning techniques. This comparative approach gives the reader insight into how a recursive partitioning technique can have an advantage over the conventional methods…Overall, the book provides an excellent introduction to tree based methods and their applications. It can be a good place to start learning about recursive partitioning. In addition, biostatisticians will enjoy the real life examples that have been used in the book."

From the Back Cover

The routes to many important outcomes including diseases and ultimately death as well as financial credit consist of multiple complex pathways containing interrelated events and conditions. We have historically lacked effective methodologies for identifying these pathways and their non-linear and interacting features. This book focuses on recursive partitioning strategies as a response to the challenge of pathway characterization. A highlight of the second edition is the many worked examples, most of them from epidemiology, bioinformatics, molecular genetics, physiology, social demography, banking, and marketing. The statistical issues, conceptual and computational, are not only treated in detail in the context of important scientific questions, but also an array of substantively-driven judgments are explicitly integrated in the presentation of examples. Going considerably beyond the standard treatments of recursive partitioning that focus on pathway representations via single trees, this second edition has entirely new material devoted to forests from predictive and interpretive perspectives. For contexts where identification of factors contributing to outcomes is a central issue, both random and deterministic forest generation methods are introduced via examples in genetics and epidemiology. The trees in deterministic forests are reproducible and more easily interpretable than the components of random forests. Also new in the second edition is an extensive treatment of survival forests and post-market evaluation of treatment effectiveness. Heping Zhang is Professor of Public Health, Statistics, and Child Study, and director of the Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science, at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lecturer Awarded by Harvard School of Public Health, and a Medallion lecturer selected by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Burton Singer is Courtesy Professor in the Emerging Pathogens Institute at University of Florida, and previously Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387986715
• ISBN-13: 978-0387986715
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,841,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fitting sequel to CART with emphasis on the health science applications, January 24, 2008

By 

Michael R. Chernick "statman31147" (Holland PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Recursive Partitioning and Applications (Statistics for Biology and Health) (Hardcover)

Brieman, Olshen, Friedman and Stone introduced CART in their 1984 book. It is an effective methodology and software tool for constructin classification and regression trees. The procedure is also referred to as recursive partitioning.

There has been a great deal of research over the past 16 on this topic and the authors cover the basics and the new material well. New ideas include survival trees and adaptive splines (including MARS). It provides interesting applications to health science problems. Th authors compare tree based methods to logistic regression. This is a notable successor to the CART text.

It is a little more difficult to read then CART. CART was motivated by biomedical problems but the book covered other applications in business and pattern recognition as well. This texts puts an emphasis on the important medical applications.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recursive Partitioning in the Health Sciences, June 12, 2000

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Boyd D. Collier (La Mesa, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recursive Partitioning and Applications (Statistics for Biology and Health) (Hardcover)

Zhang and Singer have done a splendid job of explaining recursive partitioning, a topic that should be of great interest to anyone who wants to make sense of data in which there are many potentially important variables contributing to some outcome or variable of interest. One should not be put off by the "... in the Health Sciences" part of the book's title; the potential audience of readers who can benefit from reading it is much greater than this implies (I'm an ecologist, for example). Why? First, because the topics covered have wide applicability in many fields; and second, because the writing is exceptionally clear and easy to follow. If you are able to use a typical introductory text on multiple regression, for example, you should have no difficulty getting a lot out of Zhang and Singer. If you are able to handle a mathematically rigorous approach to statistics but are new to the topics covered here, this book will provide an excellent starting place before you jump into the many references to the recent literature provided by the authors.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recursive Partitioning, May 15, 2000

By 

Walter Psoter (Farmington, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recursive Partitioning and Applications (Statistics for Biology and Health) (Hardcover)

Recursive Partitioning in the Health Sciences is one of the few statistical texts specifically written with the epidemiologist as a target end user, similar in genre to Schlesselman's Case Control Studies. The subject matter is relatively new in the field of epidemiology and as such needs to be related contextually to more traditional statistical approaches. The authors accomplish this by incorporating introductory chapters on methods corresponding to those being addressed by the nonparametric methods of recursive partitioning and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). Additionally, they compare results between these tried and true statistical methods and recursive partitioning and MARS with many illustrative examples. This last is a strength of this book. Examples of each topic under discussion are carefully considered in a stepwise manner. The book is nicely balanced in terms of theoretic background and practical applications, with the writing generally intelligible to the non-statistician. The book has provided our group with background material to allow utilization of recursive partitioning in our research. As the technique of recursive partitioning becomes recognized and subsequently applied in the epidemiological field, this book may well become a classic.