Machine Learning for Survival Analysis: Theory, Algorithms and Applications part 1

Authors: Yan Li, University of Michigan Chandan K. Reddy, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Abstract: Due to the advancements in various data acquisition and storage technologies, different disciplines have attained the ability to not only accumulate a wide variety of data but also to monitor observations over longer time periods. In many real-world applications, the primary objective of monitoring these observations is to estimate when a particular event of interest will occur in the future. One of the major difficulties in handling such problem is the presence of censoring, i.e., the event of interests is unobservable in some instance which is either because of time limitation or losing track. Due to censoring, standard statistical and machine learning based predictive models cannot readily be applied to analyze the data. An important subfield of statistics called survival analysis provides different mechanisms to handle such censored data problems.