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Main Authors: Jain, Anchit, Zhang, Kevin, Bates, Stephen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16571
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author Jain, Anchit
Zhang, Kevin
Bates, Stephen
author_facet Jain, Anchit
Zhang, Kevin
Bates, Stephen
contents Time-to-event data is widespread across the life sciences and engineering, but it is typically encountered together with censoring, which complicates the application of standard machine learning methods. Deep Cox models have emerged as a popular method for analyzing time-to-event data because they gracefully handle censoring and can be used with unstructured data such as clinical text reports, genomic sequences, and pathology images. However, their predicted survival probabilities are often poorly calibrated, thus limiting their practical utility. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc calibration method for Deep Cox models that uses isotonic regression to refine predicted survival probabilities without affecting discriminative power. We establish favorable theoretical guarantees, including a double-robustness property and asymptotic calibration. Experiments on synthetic and real-world clinical data demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16571
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Isotonic Survival Regression: Calibrated Survival Distributions from Deep Cox Models
Jain, Anchit
Zhang, Kevin
Bates, Stephen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Time-to-event data is widespread across the life sciences and engineering, but it is typically encountered together with censoring, which complicates the application of standard machine learning methods. Deep Cox models have emerged as a popular method for analyzing time-to-event data because they gracefully handle censoring and can be used with unstructured data such as clinical text reports, genomic sequences, and pathology images. However, their predicted survival probabilities are often poorly calibrated, thus limiting their practical utility. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc calibration method for Deep Cox models that uses isotonic regression to refine predicted survival probabilities without affecting discriminative power. We establish favorable theoretical guarantees, including a double-robustness property and asymptotic calibration. Experiments on synthetic and real-world clinical data demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our method.
title Isotonic Survival Regression: Calibrated Survival Distributions from Deep Cox Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16571