English

Optimal Sparse Survival Trees

Machine Learning 2024-05-24 v3

Abstract

Interpretability is crucial for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology corporations to analyze and make decisions for high stakes problems that involve human health. Tree-based methods have been widely adopted for survival analysis due to their appealing interpretablility and their ability to capture complex relationships. However, most existing methods to produce survival trees rely on heuristic (or greedy) algorithms, which risk producing sub-optimal models. We present a dynamic-programming-with-bounds approach that finds provably-optimal sparse survival tree models, frequently in only a few seconds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.15330,
  title  = {Optimal Sparse Survival Trees},
  author = {Rui Zhang and Rui Xin and Margo Seltzer and Cynthia Rudin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.15330},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

AISTATS2024 camera ready version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.14980

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:28:52.685Z