Hello I am using rpart with survival data. When I 'printcp' I get the results below. Can someone please explain two things for me in lay man's terms. 1) What exactly is the complexity parameter? 2) How do I calculate the absolute cross validated error rate when the root node error in my example is 1.39? Thanks you. spok leen Survival regression tree: rpart(formula = Surv(fu, death) ~ p + k + c + g + a + e, data = dat2, xval = 700) Variables actually used in tree construction: [1] c e k p a Root node error: 972.86/700 = 1.3898 n= 700 CP nsplit rel error xerror xstd 1 0.068408 0 1.00000 1.00390 0.048144 2 0.036091 1 0.93159 0.93917 0.048700 3 0.025606 2 0.89550 0.94267 0.052853 4 0.022596 3 0.86990 0.90079 0.052251 5 0.011670 4 0.84730 0.87244 0.050768 6 0.010000 5 0.83563 0.90675 0.053937