Behnaz Alafchi¹, Leili Tapak^1,*, Hassan Doosti², Christophe Chesneau³, Ghodratollah Roshanaei¹

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.135, No.3, pp. 2047-2064, 2023, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2022.022647

Abstract Survival data with a multi-state structure are frequently observed in follow-up studies. An analytic approach based on a multi-state model (MSM) should be used in longitudinal health studies in which a patient experiences a sequence of clinical progression events. One main objective in the MSM framework is variable selection, where attempts are made to identify the risk factors associated with the transition hazard rates or probabilities of disease progression. The usual variable selection methods, including stepwise and penalized methods, do not provide information about the importance of variables. In this context, we present a two-step algorithm to evaluate the importance… More >

Shufang Song^1,*, Ruyang He¹, Zhaoyin Shi¹, Weiya Zhang²

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.128, No.1, pp. 65-85, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2021.015378

Abstract The variable importance measure (VIM) can be implemented to rank or select important variables, which can effectively reduce the variable dimension and shorten the computational time. Random forest (RF) is an ensemble learning method by constructing multiple decision trees. In order to improve the prediction accuracy of random forest, advanced random forest is presented by using Kriging models as the models of leaf nodes in all the decision trees. Referring to the Mean Decrease Accuracy (MDA) index based on Out-of-Bag (OOB) data, the single variable, group variables and correlated variables importance measures are proposed to establish a complete VIM system… More >