The Principal Investigator will study statistical methods. These involve the optimal choices of sequences of binary questions for problems of classification, probability class estimation, regression, and survival analysis. Much of the computer- intensive research that is planned involves new capabilities and significant improvements of the algorithms and techniques given by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, and Stone in Classification and Regression Trees and its associated CART software. Some computations will be done in an innovative distributed mode on a system of workstations. The investigators plan applications to test data sets, particularly a large data set concerning the quick diagnosis of heart attack. Details are given for an application to the enhancement of certain magnetic resonance images that are important to making prognoses for patients with lymphoma. (Support is not requested for the conduct of clinical trials; indeed, the data do not arise from conventional clinical trials.) The statistics research involved is of importance to a wide variety of applications, some of them medical.
