Recursive Partitioning Methods for Life History Processes

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The analysis of life history processes is an important aspect of statistical science with applications in a wide range of fields including actuarial science, economics, engineering, environmental sciences, management, medicine, operations, public health, and social and behavioural sciences. Many scientific problems in the area focalize interests in the relationship between various possibly coarsened event times and a set of covariates for the purposes of explanation and prediction. Such relationship is conventionally characterized by regression. Proportional hazard regression is the most commonly-used parametric (or semiparametric) regression for lifetime data. One major concern for parametric regression is that statistical inference can be misleading if model assumptions are not satisfied. Recursive partitioning methods are powerful non-parametric alternatives using machine-learning techniques. They are appealing since they require no specification of the model structure and they usually lead to practically friendly models with intuitive interpretation so that they have great potential to be easily accepted by practitioners. Most existing literature of recursive partitioning is restricted to the analysis of completely observed responses (categorical or continuous) or right-censored survival data, however, complex life history data with multiple types of data coarsening remain to be developed. The objective of this research proposal is to provide a comprehensive account of novel recursive partitioning methods for life history processes.