Deep Copula-Based Survival Analysis for Dependent Censoring with Identifiability Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Weijia, Ling, Chun Kai, Zhang, Xuanhui
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Zhang, Weijia
Ling, Chun Kai
Zhang, Xuanhui
author_facet Zhang, Weijia
Ling, Chun Kai
Zhang, Xuanhui
contents Censoring is the central problem in survival analysis where either the time-to-event (for instance, death), or the time-tocensoring (such as loss of follow-up) is observed for each sample. The majority of existing machine learning-based survival analysis methods assume that survival is conditionally independent of censoring given a set of covariates; an assumption that cannot be verified since only marginal distributions is available from the data. The existence of dependent censoring, along with the inherent bias in current estimators has been demonstrated in a variety of applications, accentuating the need for a more nuanced approach. However, existing methods that adjust for dependent censoring require practitioners to specify the ground truth copula. This requirement poses a significant challenge for practical applications, as model misspecification can lead to substantial bias. In this work, we propose a flexible deep learning-based survival analysis method that simultaneously accommodate for dependent censoring and eliminates the requirement for specifying the ground truth copula. We theoretically prove the identifiability of our model under a broad family of copulas and survival distributions. Experiments results from a wide range of datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully discerns the underlying dependency structure and significantly reduces survival estimation bias when compared to existing methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_15566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Copula-Based Survival Analysis for Dependent Censoring with Identifiability Guarantees
Zhang, Weijia
Ling, Chun Kai
Zhang, Xuanhui
Machine Learning
Censoring is the central problem in survival analysis where either the time-to-event (for instance, death), or the time-tocensoring (such as loss of follow-up) is observed for each sample. The majority of existing machine learning-based survival analysis methods assume that survival is conditionally independent of censoring given a set of covariates; an assumption that cannot be verified since only marginal distributions is available from the data. The existence of dependent censoring, along with the inherent bias in current estimators has been demonstrated in a variety of applications, accentuating the need for a more nuanced approach. However, existing methods that adjust for dependent censoring require practitioners to specify the ground truth copula. This requirement poses a significant challenge for practical applications, as model misspecification can lead to substantial bias. In this work, we propose a flexible deep learning-based survival analysis method that simultaneously accommodate for dependent censoring and eliminates the requirement for specifying the ground truth copula. We theoretically prove the identifiability of our model under a broad family of copulas and survival distributions. Experiments results from a wide range of datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully discerns the underlying dependency structure and significantly reduces survival estimation bias when compared to existing methods.
title Deep Copula-Based Survival Analysis for Dependent Censoring with Identifiability Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15566