Random Competing Risks Forests for Large Data

Abstract

Random forests are a sensible non-parametric model to predict competing risk data according to some covariates. However, there are currently no packages that can adequately handle large datasets ($n > 100,000$). We introduce a new R package, largeRCRF, using the random competing risks forest theory developed by Ishwaran et al. (2014). We verify our package's validity and accuracy through simulation studies and show that its results are similar enough to randomForestSRC while taking less time to run. We also demonstrate the package on a large dataset that was previously inaccessible, using hardware requirements that are available to most researchers.