Survival In-Context: Amortized Bayesian Survival Analysis via Prior-Fitted Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Seletkov, Dmitrii, Hager, Paul, Kaissis, Georgios, Braren, Rickmer, Rueckert, Daniel, Rehms, Raphael
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Seletkov, Dmitrii
Hager, Paul
Kaissis, Georgios
Braren, Rickmer
Rueckert, Daniel
Rehms, Raphael
author_facet Seletkov, Dmitrii
Hager, Paul
Kaissis, Georgios
Braren, Rickmer
Rueckert, Daniel
Rehms, Raphael
contents Survival analysis is crucial for many medical applications, but remains challenging for modern machine learning due to limited data, censoring, and the heterogeneity of tabular covariates. While the prior-fitted paradigm, which relies on pretraining models on large collections of synthetic datasets, has recently facilitated tabular foundation models for classification and regression, its suitability for time-to-event modeling remains unclear. We propose a flexible survival data generation framework that defines a rich survival prior with explicit control over covariates and time-event distributions. Building on this prior, we introduce Survival In-Context (SIC), a prior-fitted in-context learning model for survival analysis that is pretrained exclusively on synthetic data. SIC is trained to approximate Bayesian posterior predictive inference under the synthetic survival prior, enabling individualized survival prediction in a single forward pass, requiring no task-specific training or hyperparameter tuning. Across a broad evaluation on real-world survival datasets, SIC achieves competitive or superior performance compared to classical and deep survival models, particularly in small and medium-sized data regimes, highlighting the promise of a prior-fitted paradigm for survival analysis. The code and pretrained models will be made available upon publication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29475
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Survival In-Context: Amortized Bayesian Survival Analysis via Prior-Fitted Networks
Seletkov, Dmitrii
Hager, Paul
Kaissis, Georgios
Braren, Rickmer
Rueckert, Daniel
Rehms, Raphael
Machine Learning
Survival analysis is crucial for many medical applications, but remains challenging for modern machine learning due to limited data, censoring, and the heterogeneity of tabular covariates. While the prior-fitted paradigm, which relies on pretraining models on large collections of synthetic datasets, has recently facilitated tabular foundation models for classification and regression, its suitability for time-to-event modeling remains unclear. We propose a flexible survival data generation framework that defines a rich survival prior with explicit control over covariates and time-event distributions. Building on this prior, we introduce Survival In-Context (SIC), a prior-fitted in-context learning model for survival analysis that is pretrained exclusively on synthetic data. SIC is trained to approximate Bayesian posterior predictive inference under the synthetic survival prior, enabling individualized survival prediction in a single forward pass, requiring no task-specific training or hyperparameter tuning. Across a broad evaluation on real-world survival datasets, SIC achieves competitive or superior performance compared to classical and deep survival models, particularly in small and medium-sized data regimes, highlighting the promise of a prior-fitted paradigm for survival analysis. The code and pretrained models will be made available upon publication.
title Survival In-Context: Amortized Bayesian Survival Analysis via Prior-Fitted Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29475