A Deep Survival Analysis Method Based on Ranking

Publication date: Available online 6 June 2019Source: Artificial Intelligence in MedicineAuthor(s): Bingzhong Jing, Tao Zhang, Zixian Wang, Ying Jin, Kuiyuan Liu, Wenze Qiu, Liangru Ke, Ying Sun, Caisheng He, Dan Hou, Linquan Tang, Xing Lv, Chaofeng LiAbstractSurvival analyses of populations and the establishment of prognoses for individual patients are important activities in the practice of medicine. Standard survival models, such as the Cox proportional hazards model, require extensive feature engineering or prior knowledge to model at an individual level. Some survival analysis models can avoid these problems by using machine learning extended the CPH model, and higher performance has been reported. In this paper, we propose an innovative loss function that is defined as the sum of an extended mean squared error loss and a pairwise ranking loss based on ranking information on survival data. We apply this loss function to optimize a deep feed-forward neural network (RankDeepSurv), which can be used to model survival data. We demonstrate that the performance of our model, RankDeepSurv, is superior to that of other state-of-the-art survival models based on an analysis of 4 public medical clinical datasets. When modelling the prognosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), RankDeepSurv achieved better prognostic accuracy than the CPH established by clinical experts. The difference between high and low risk groups in the RankDeepSurv model is greater than the difference in the CP...
Source: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine - Category: Bioinformatics Source Type: research