K-Adaptive Partitioning for Survival Data: The kaps Add-on Package for R

The partitioning of an ordered prognostic factor is important in order to obtain several groups having heterogeneous survivals in medical research. For this purpose, a binary split has often been used once or recursively. We propose the use of a multi-way split in order to afford an optimal set of cut-off points. In practice, the number of groups (K) may not be specified in advance. Thus, we also suggest finding an optimal K by a resampling technique. The algorithm was implemented into an R package that we called kaps, which can be used conveniently and freely. It was illustrated with a toy dataset, and was also applied to a real data set of colorectal cancer cases from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results.