Predicting Ovarian Cancer Survival Times: Performance of Parametric Methods and Random Survival Forests

This project is an exploration of the performance of parametric and nonparametric methods in predicting time to recurrence (progression of cancer) and time to death in late stage ovarian cancer patients. The Weibull survival model is a common parametric method and is fit to the data for both death and recurrence, while Ishwaran et al’s method of fitting random survival forests (2008) is employed as a nonparametric method. Performance of these models is evaluated using Harrell’s C-index and Lawless & Yuan’s cross-validation estimator (2010).