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Model-based random forests for ordinal regression.
Journal article

Model-based random forests for ordinal regression.

  • Buri M Institut für Epidemiologie, Biostatistik und Prävention, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
  • Hothorn T Institut für Epidemiologie, Biostatistik und Prävention, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
  • 2020-08-09
Published in:
  • The international journal of biostatistics. - 2020
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
conditional distribution function
conditional odds function
ordinal outcome
random forest
transformation model
English We study and compare several variants of random forests tailored to prognostic models for ordinal outcomes. Models of the conditional odds function are employed to understand the various random forest flavours. Existing random forest variants for ordinal outcomes, such as Ordinal Forests and Conditional Inference Forests, are evaluated in the presence of a non-proportional odds impact of prognostic variables. We propose two novel random forest variants in the model-based transformation forest family, only one of which explicitly assumes proportional odds. These two novel transformation forests differ in the specification of the split procedures for the underlying ordinal trees. One of these split criteria is able to detect changes in non-proportional odds situations and the other one focuses on finding proportional-odds signals. We empirically evaluate the performance of the existing and proposed methods using a simulation study and illustrate the practical aspects of the procedures by a re-analysis of the respiratory sub-item in functional rating scales of patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/119528
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