An Ensemble Method for Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a survival forest method tailored for interval-censored data, demonstrating its effectiveness through simulations and real data application, especially in nonlinear scenarios.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel survival forest approach for interval-censored data within the conditional inference framework, including parameter tuning guidance.

Findings

Performs well with tree-structured models

Comparable to Cox model for linear relationships

Outperforms other methods in nonlinear cases

Abstract

Interval-censored data analysis is important in biomedical statistics for any type of time-to-event response where the time of response is not known exactly, but rather only known to occur between two assessment times. Many clinical trials and longitudinal studies generate interval-censored data; one common example occurs in medical studies that entail periodic follow-up. In this paper we propose a survival forest method for interval-censored data based on the conditional inference framework. We describe how this framework can be adapted to the situation of interval-censored data. We show that the tuning parameters have a non-negligible effect on the survival forest performance and guidance is provided on how to tune the parameters in a data-dependent way to improve the overall performance of the method. Using Monte Carlo simulations we find that the proposed survival forest is at least as effective as a survival tree method when the underlying model has a tree structure, performs similarly to an interval-censored Cox proportional hazards model fit when the true relationship is linear, and outperforms the survival tree method and Cox model when the true relationship is nonlinear. We illustrate the application of the method on a tooth emergence data set.