This book deals with survival trees and their application to the analysis and prediction of
innovation diffusion processes. Three major contributions of the book are noteworthy: Firstly
the author presents a very comprehensive accurate and accessible overview of the current
research activities on survival trees. This is particularly important because due to the
novelty of the method no universally accepted best approach exists yet many technical details
of the method are still subject to ongoing research and debate. By providing an overview of the
current state of research the author identifies the different approaches that have been
proposed for splitting nodes pruning and final tree selection providing guidance for the
choice of an appropriate approach to the applied part of the text. Secondly the overview of
statistical packages that are available for survival tree analyses and the discussion of their
respective merits and limitations has a high practical value and is unique within its category.
Thirdly the applied part of the text successfully demonstrates the usefulness of the survival
tree method to identify clusters with significant differences in expected adoption times thus
providing a rigorous and easyly interpretable analysis of early and late adopter groups. In the
discussion section the authorfurther points out how the survival tree method deals with
censored observations.
