Burkhard Freiherr Von Wangenheim

Survival Trees - a New Method in Innovation Theory: a Successful Introduction of a Method Commonly Used in Survival Analysis into the Field of Innovation Diffusion Theory Burkhard Freiherr Von Wangenheim

This book deals with survival trees and their application to the analysis and prediction of innovation diffusion processes. Three major contributions of the book are noteworthy: Firstly, the author presents a very comprehensive, accurate and accessible overview of the current research activities on survival trees. This is particularly important because, due to the novelty of the method, no universally accepted best approach exists yet; many technical details of the method are still subject to ongoing research and debate. By providing an overview of the current state of research, the author identifies the different approaches that have been proposed for splitting nodes, pruning, and final tree selection, providing guidance for the choice of an appropriate approach to the applied part of the text. Secondly, the overview of statistical packages that are available for survival tree analyses and the discussion of their respective merits and limitations has a high practical value and is unique within its category. Thirdly, the applied part of the text successfully demonstrates the usefulness of the survival tree method to identify clusters with significant differences in expected adoption times, thus providing a rigorous and easyly interpretable analysis of early and late adopter groups. In the discussion section, the authorfurther points out how the survival tree method deals with censored observations.