Regression and recursive partition strategies in the analysis of medical survival data

Abstract Regression and clustering methods have both been used to explore the effects of explanatory variables on survival times for patients with cancer or other chronic diseases. This paper discusses effective and computationally feasible approaches for this task in situations where there are fairly large and complex data sets; the techniques stressed are all-subsets regression and a kind of recursive partition clustering. We compare the two approaches in a rather general way, in part by examining some survival data for patients with ovarian carcinoma, and conclude that both have strong points to recommend them.