Learning Survival Distributions with the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sheng, Deming, Henao, Ricardo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sheng, Deming
Henao, Ricardo
author_facet Sheng, Deming
Henao, Ricardo
contents Probabilistic survival analysis models seek to estimate the distribution of the future occurrence (time) of an event given a set of covariates. In recent years, these models have preferred nonparametric specifications that avoid directly estimating survival distributions via discretization. Specifically, they estimate the probability of an individual event at fixed times or the time of an event at fixed probabilities (quantiles), using supervised learning. Borrowing ideas from the quantile regression literature, we propose a parametric survival analysis method based on the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution (ALD). This distribution allows for closed-form calculation of popular event summaries such as mean, median, mode, variation, and quantiles. The model is optimized by maximum likelihood to learn, at the individual level, the parameters (location, scale, and asymmetry) of the ALD distribution. Extensive results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms parametric and nonparametric approaches in terms of accuracy, discrimination and calibration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03712
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Survival Distributions with the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution
Sheng, Deming
Henao, Ricardo
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Probabilistic survival analysis models seek to estimate the distribution of the future occurrence (time) of an event given a set of covariates. In recent years, these models have preferred nonparametric specifications that avoid directly estimating survival distributions via discretization. Specifically, they estimate the probability of an individual event at fixed times or the time of an event at fixed probabilities (quantiles), using supervised learning. Borrowing ideas from the quantile regression literature, we propose a parametric survival analysis method based on the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution (ALD). This distribution allows for closed-form calculation of popular event summaries such as mean, median, mode, variation, and quantiles. The model is optimized by maximum likelihood to learn, at the individual level, the parameters (location, scale, and asymmetry) of the ALD distribution. Extensive results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms parametric and nonparametric approaches in terms of accuracy, discrimination and calibration.
title Learning Survival Distributions with the Asymmetric Laplace Distribution
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03712