Graduation Year

2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Granting Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Major Professor

Chris Tsokos, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Gangaram Ladde, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kandethody M. Ramachandran, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Wonkuk Kim, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Marcus McWaters, Ph.D.

Keywords

decision tree, survival analysis, accelerated failure model, Cox proportional hazard model, Kaplan-Meier

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to investigate various problems associate with breast cancer and lung cancer patients. In this study, we compare the effectiveness of breast cancer treatments using decision tree analysis and come to the conclusion that although certain treatment shows overall effectiveness over the others, physicians or doctors should discretionally give different treatment to breast cancer patients based on their characteristics. Reoccurrence time of breast caner patients who receive different treatments are compared in an overall sense, histology type is also taken into consideration. To further understand the relation between relapse time and other variables, statistical models are applied to identify the attribute variables and predict the relapse time. Of equal importance, the transition between different breast cancer stages are analyzed through Markov Chain which not only gives the transition probability between stages for specific treatment but also provide guidance on breast cancer treatment based on stating information.

Sensitivity analysis is conducted on breast cancer doubling time which involves two commonly used assumptions: spherical tumor and exponential growth of tumor and the analysis reveals that variation from those assumptions could cause very different statistical behavior of breast cancer doubling time.

In lung cancer study, we investigate the mortality time of lung cancer patients from several different perspectives: gender, cigarettes per day and duration of smoking. Statistical model is also used to predict the mortality time of lung cancer patients.

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