Cox model and decision trees: an application to breast cancer data.

Objective: To evaluate, using semiparametric methodologies of survival analysis, the relationship between covariates and time to death of patients with breast cancer, as well as the determination discriminatory power in the conditional inference tree of patients who had cancer.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using data collected from medical records of women who had breast cancer and underwent treatment between 2005 and 2015 at the Hospital da Fundação de Assistencial da Paraíba in Campina Grande, State of Paraiba, Brazil. Survival curves were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method, Cox regression, and conditional decision tree.