Survival trees - a new method in innovation theory

The thesis deals with survival trees and their application to the analysis and prediction of innovation processes. The purpose of the conducted research was (1) to investigate the appropriateness of survival trees for innovation diffusion research by means of an application of the method to a real dataset, (2) to give an overview of the current state of research on the survival tree method, and (3) to compare survival trees to more established methods of event history analysis, such as hazard rate models, in order to discuss both advantages and disadvantages of survival trees vis-à-vis alternative approaches.