Developing an Improved Statistical Approach for Survival Estimation in Bone Metastases Management: The Bone Metastases Ensemble Trees for Survival (BMETS) Model

To determine whether a machine learning approach optimizes survival estimation for patients with symptomatic bone metastases (SBM), we developed the Bone Metastases Ensemble Trees for Survival (BMETS) to predict survival using 27 prognostic covariates. To establish its relative clinical utility, we compared BMETS with 2 simpler Cox regression models used in this setting.For 492 bone sites in 397 patients evaluated for palliative radiation...