Fig. 3

Random survival forest (RSF) tuning and variable importance. For (A) OS and (B) CSS, the left panels plot out-of-bag (OOB) error against the number of trees; the vertical dashed line marks the ntree with the lowest OOB error (best ntree). Right panels show permutation-based variable importance ranked from highest to lowest; larger bars indicate greater predictive contribution, with surgery, SEER summary stage, and differentiation grade among the top predictors. RSF models used log-rank splitting and internal OOB estimation; details appear in Methods. RSF, random survival forest; OOB, out-of-bag; SEER, Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results.