Penalized quantile regression tree

Quantile regression provides a variety of useful statistical information to examine how covariates influence the conditional quantile functions of a response variable. However, traditional quantile regression (which assume a linear model) is not appropriate when the relationship between the response and the covariates is a nonlinear. It is also necessary to conduct variable selection for high dimensional data or strongly correlated covariates. In this paper, we propose a penalized quantile regression tree model. The split rule of the proposed method is based on residual analysis, which has a negligible bias to select a split variable and reasonable computational cost. A simulation study and real data analysis are presented to demonstrate the satisfactory performance and usefulness of the proposed method.