This book describes the recursive partitioning methodology and demonstrates its effectiveness as a response to the challenge of analyzing and interpreting multiple complex pathways to many illnesses, diseases, and ultimately death. For comparison purposes, standard regression methods are presented briefly and they are applied in the examples. We emphasize particularly the importance of scientific judgment and interpretation while guided by statistical output. This book is suitable for three broad groups of readers: biomedical researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners including epidemiologists, health service researchers, environmental policy advisers; consulting statisticians who can use the recursive partitioning technique as a guide in providing effective and insightful solutions to clients' problems; and statisticians interested in methodological and theoretical issues.This book provides an up-to-date summary of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of recursive partitioning. It also presents a host of unsolved problems whose solutions would advance the rigorous underpinnings of statistics in general. Heping Zhang is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Child Study at Yale University. In addition to the methodology and application of recursive partitioning, he is interested in developing statistical methods for analyzing correlated data, especially family and genetic studies, and brain imaging problems. Burton Singer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests include combinatorial formulation of randomness, infectious disease epidemiology, and bio-demography of aging.

Review

STATISTICAL METHODS IN MEDICAL RESEARCH

"The beauty of the Zhang and Singera (TM)s book is that it gives an excellent comparison between conventional regression models and recursive partitioning techniques. This comparative approach gives the reader insight into how a recursive partitioning technique can have an advantage over the conventional methodsa ]Overall, the book provides an excellent introduction to tree based methods and their applications. It can be a good place to start learning about recursive partitioning. In addition, biostatisticians will enjoy the real life examples that have been used in the book."

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