title: Primer on medical decision analysis: Part 2--Building a tree.
abstract: This part of a five-part series covering practical issues in the performance of decision analysis outlines the basic strategies for building decision trees. The authors offer six recommendations for building and programming decision trees. Following these six recommendations will facilitate performance of the sensitivity analyses required to achieve two goals. The first is to find modeling or programming errors, a process known as "debugging" the tree. The second is to determine the robustness of the qualitative conclusions drawn from the analysis.
authors.affiliation: University of Toronto Programme in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research (The Toronto Hospital and The Sunnybrook Health Science Centre Units), Ontario, Canada. detsky@utstat.toronto.edu
authors.forename: A S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Detsky
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Naglie
authors.forename: M D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Krahn
authors.forename: D A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Redelmeier
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Naimark
mesh_terms: D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003663:Decision Trees; D006801:Humans; D011336:Probability; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012984:Software