Description before prediction: evolutionary games in oncology

As I discussed towards the end of an old post on cross-validation and prediction: we don’t always want to have prediction as our primary goal, or metric of success. In fact, I think that if a discipline has not found a vocabulary for its basic terms, a grammar for combining those terms, and a framework for collecting, interpreting, and/or translating experimental practice into those terms then focusing on prediction can actually slow us down or push us in the wrong direction. To adapt Knuth: I suspect that premature optimization of predictive potential is the root of all evil.

We need to first have a good framework for describing and summarizing phenomena before we set out to build theories within that framework for predicting phenomena.

In this brief post, I want to ask if evolutionary games in oncology are ready for building predictive models. Or if they are still in need of establishing themselves as a good descriptive framework.