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Regression Tree Construction By Bootstrap: Model Search For Drg-Systems Applied To Austrian Health-Data, Thomas Grubinger, Conrad Kobel, Karl Peter Pfeiffer

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Background. DRG-systems are used to allocate resources fairly to hospitals based on their performance. Statistically, this allocation is based on simple rules that can be modeled with regression trees. However, the resulting models often have to be adjusted manually to be medically reasonable and ethical. Methods. Despite the possibility of manual, performance degenerating adaptations of the original model, alternative trees are systematically searched. The bootstrap-based method bumping is used to build diverse and accurate regression tree models for DRG-systems. A two-step model selection approach is proposed. First, a reasonable model complexity is chosen, based on statistical, medical and economical considerations. …