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. Key words: decision analysis; expected value; utility; sensitivity analysis; decision trees; probability. (Med Decis Making 1997;17: 126-135)