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Autori principali: Kim, Da In, Lai, Wei Siang, Zhang, Kelly W.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22259
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author Kim, Da In
Lai, Wei Siang
Zhang, Kelly W.
author_facet Kim, Da In
Lai, Wei Siang
Zhang, Kelly W.
contents While tabular foundation models have achieved remarkable success in classification and regression, adapting them to model time-to-event outcomes for survival analysis is non-trivial due to right-censoring, where data observations may end before the event occurs. We develop a classification-based framework that reformulates both static and dynamic survival analysis as a series of binary classification problems by discretizing event times. Censored observations are naturally handled as examples with missing labels at certain time points. This classification formulation enables existing tabular foundation models to perform survival analysis through in-context learning without explicit training. We prove that under standard censoring assumptions, minimizing our binary classification loss recovers the true survival probabilities as the training set size increases. We demonstrate through evaluation across $53$ real-world datasets that off-the-shelf tabular foundation models with this classification formulation outperform classical and deep learning baselines on average over multiple survival metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tabular Foundation Models Can Do Survival Analysis
Kim, Da In
Lai, Wei Siang
Zhang, Kelly W.
Machine Learning
While tabular foundation models have achieved remarkable success in classification and regression, adapting them to model time-to-event outcomes for survival analysis is non-trivial due to right-censoring, where data observations may end before the event occurs. We develop a classification-based framework that reformulates both static and dynamic survival analysis as a series of binary classification problems by discretizing event times. Censored observations are naturally handled as examples with missing labels at certain time points. This classification formulation enables existing tabular foundation models to perform survival analysis through in-context learning without explicit training. We prove that under standard censoring assumptions, minimizing our binary classification loss recovers the true survival probabilities as the training set size increases. We demonstrate through evaluation across $53$ real-world datasets that off-the-shelf tabular foundation models with this classification formulation outperform classical and deep learning baselines on average over multiple survival metrics.
title Tabular Foundation Models Can Do Survival Analysis
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22259