Abstract
Patients may respond differently to the same treatment due to individual traits such as age or gender. Knowing how different traits can affect a patient's response to treatment can help doctors and patients make better treatment decisions. For example, this information can help doctors know what types of cancer medicines work better for certain patients. This project focuses on improving the methods that researchers use to compare how treatments work for different patients.
In this project, the research team developed and tested a statistical method called random forests, or RF. RF is a way to analyze data using a technique called machine learning. In machine learning, computers use data to learn how to perform different tasks with little or no human input. Many types of RF methods exist. The team compared multiple RF methods to learn how well the methods would work to find out how patients with different traits respond to the same treatment.
To access the R package, please visit the randomForestSRC CRAN webpage.
To develop and evaluate random forest methods for estimating individual treatment effects. Specifically, aim 1 was to develop comprehensive methodology (a) to estimate individual TEs (ITEs) for patients using counterfactual random forest (RF) machines for heterogeneous data, which (b) work across differing magnitudes of HTE, when (c) data are observational with potential confounding, and (d) with survival outcomes and multiple treatment comparisons. Aim 2 was to develop software to implement these new methods in a wide array of comparative effectiveness research applications by adding functionality to the existing CRAN-distributed randomForestSRC package developed by our group, a package in its fifth release at the beginning of this project.