I am using rpart to build a CART model (method = “anova”) and predict.rpart with type = “vector to make a prediction. I understand that that way is building a regression tree, but I really have trouble understanding what the mean response at the node refers to by using type = “vector” according to the manual. Does it mean predicted probability or sort of averaged results for the predicted continuous outcome values?

If I want to calculate AUC, can I directly use the predicted output (with type = “vector”) as predicted probabilities for the calculation of AUC?