Tree based weighted learning for estimating individualized treatment rules with censored data (Q2412261)

In this paper, the authors investigate a major problem in the field of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is an emerging research area and consists, broadly speaking, in the estimation of the correct treatment and/or the correct dose as a function of the patient's covariates. In particular, this paper is focused on the estimation of the survival function in the presence of right-censored data. In such a setting, the response of interest is only partially observed. To overcome this problem, a nonparametric tree-based approach is introduced. The problem is that the survival time is not available for all the subjects and must be estimated. Two different estimation procedures are defined: a first one considers the estimation of the survival time for all the subjects, while the second one uses the estimated values only in the case of censored times. Under mild conditions, the authors prove the consistency of the method, and a result about the rate of convergence is also provided. Finally, the authors show that the method proposed here outperforms the classical competitors. This is done through a simulation study with 4 different scenarios.