A comparative study on splitting criteria of a survival tree based on the Cox proportional model.

We treat the situations that the effect of covariates on hazard is differed in subgroups of patients. To handle this situation, we can consider the hybrid model of the Cox model and tree-structured model. Through simulation studies, we compared several splitting criteria for constructing this hybrid model. As a result, the criterion using the degree of the improvement in the negative maximum partial log-likelihood obtained by splitting showed a good performance for many situations. We also present the results obtained by applying this tree model in an actual medical research study to show its utility.