SurvUnc: A Meta-Model Based Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Survival Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Yu, Tao, Weiyao, Xia, Tong, Knight, Simon, Zhu, Tingting
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liu, Yu
Tao, Weiyao
Xia, Tong
Knight, Simon
Zhu, Tingting
author_facet Liu, Yu
Tao, Weiyao
Xia, Tong
Knight, Simon
Zhu, Tingting
contents Survival analysis, which estimates the probability of event occurrence over time from censored data, is fundamental in numerous real-world applications, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and risk assessment. Despite advances in numerous survival models, quantifying the uncertainty of predictions from these models remains underexplored and challenging. The lack of reliable uncertainty quantification limits the interpretability and trustworthiness of survival models, hindering their adoption in clinical decision-making and other sensitive applications. To bridge this gap, in this work, we introduce SurvUnc, a novel meta-model based framework for post-hoc uncertainty quantification for survival models. SurvUnc introduces an anchor-based learning strategy that integrates concordance knowledge into meta-model optimization, leveraging pairwise ranking performance to estimate uncertainty effectively. Notably, our framework is model-agnostic, ensuring compatibility with any survival model without requiring modifications to its architecture or access to its internal parameters. Especially, we design a comprehensive evaluation pipeline tailored to this critical yet overlooked problem. Through extensive experiments on four publicly available benchmarking datasets and five representative survival models, we demonstrate the superiority of SurvUnc across multiple evaluation scenarios, including selective prediction, misprediction detection, and out-of-domain detection. Our results highlight the effectiveness of SurvUnc in enhancing model interpretability and reliability, paving the way for more trustworthy survival predictions in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14803
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SurvUnc: A Meta-Model Based Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Survival Analysis
Liu, Yu
Tao, Weiyao
Xia, Tong
Knight, Simon
Zhu, Tingting
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Survival analysis, which estimates the probability of event occurrence over time from censored data, is fundamental in numerous real-world applications, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and risk assessment. Despite advances in numerous survival models, quantifying the uncertainty of predictions from these models remains underexplored and challenging. The lack of reliable uncertainty quantification limits the interpretability and trustworthiness of survival models, hindering their adoption in clinical decision-making and other sensitive applications. To bridge this gap, in this work, we introduce SurvUnc, a novel meta-model based framework for post-hoc uncertainty quantification for survival models. SurvUnc introduces an anchor-based learning strategy that integrates concordance knowledge into meta-model optimization, leveraging pairwise ranking performance to estimate uncertainty effectively. Notably, our framework is model-agnostic, ensuring compatibility with any survival model without requiring modifications to its architecture or access to its internal parameters. Especially, we design a comprehensive evaluation pipeline tailored to this critical yet overlooked problem. Through extensive experiments on four publicly available benchmarking datasets and five representative survival models, we demonstrate the superiority of SurvUnc across multiple evaluation scenarios, including selective prediction, misprediction detection, and out-of-domain detection. Our results highlight the effectiveness of SurvUnc in enhancing model interpretability and reliability, paving the way for more trustworthy survival predictions in real-world applications.
title SurvUnc: A Meta-Model Based Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Survival Analysis
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14803