# Boost-R: Gradient Boosted Trees for Recurrence Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08784/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [DeepSurv: Personalized Treatment Recommender System Using A Cox Proportional Hazards Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00931/) (2016)
- [Machine Learning for Survival Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04649/) (2017)
- [Deep Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02158/) (2016)
- [A Recurrent Neural Network Survival Model: Predicting Web User Return Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04098/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reliability Engineering for AI Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35316/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recurrence data arise from multi-disciplinary domains spanning reliability, cyber security, healthcare, online retailing, etc. This paper investigates an additive-tree-based approach, known as Boost-R (Boosting for Recurrence Data), for recurrent event data with both static and dynamic features. Boost-R constructs an ensemble of gradient boosted additive trees to estimate the cumulative intensity function of the recurrent event process, where a new tree is added to the ensemble by minimizing the regularized L2 distance between the observed and predicted cumulative intensity. Unlike conventional regression trees, a time-dependent function is constructed by Boost-R on each tree leaf. The sum of these functions, from multiple trees, yields the ensemble estimator of the cumulative intensity. The divide-and-conquer nature of tree-based methods is appealing when hidden sub-populations exist within a heterogeneous population. The non-parametric nature of regression trees helps to avoid parametric assumptions on the complex interactions between event processes and features. Critical insights and advantages of Boost-R are investigated through comprehensive numerical examples. Datasets and computer code of Boost-R are made available on GitHub. To our best knowledge, Boost-R is the first gradient boosted additive-tree-based approach for modeling large-scale recurrent event data with both static and dynamic feature information.