survival prediction
SurvivalPFN: Amortizing Survival Prediction via In-Context Bayesian Inference
Qi, Shi-ang, Balazadeh, Vahid, Cooper, Michael, Greiner, Russell, Krishnan, Rahul G.
Survival analysis provides a powerful statistical framework for modeling time-to-event outcomes in the presence of censoring. However, selecting an appropriate estimator from the many specialized survival approaches often requires substantial methodological and domain expertise. We introduce SurvivalPFN, a prior-data fitted network that amortizes Bayesian inference for censored observations through in-context learning. SurvivalPFN is pretrained on a diverse family of synthetic, identifiable, and right-censored data-generating processes, enabling it to amortize survival analysis in a single forward pass during inference. As a result, the model adapts to the effective complexity of each dataset without task-specific training or hyperparameter tuning, avoids restrictive parametric assumptions, and produces calibrated survival distributions. In a large-scale benchmark spanning 61 datasets, 21 methods, and 5 evaluation metrics, SurvivalPFN achieves strong predictive performance and often improves upon established survival models. These results suggest that SurvivalPFN offers a principled and practical foundation model for survival analysis, with potential applications in high-impact domains such as healthcare, finance, and engineering (https://github.com/rgklab/SurvivalPFN).
Methodology for Comparing Machine Learning Algorithms for Survival Analysis
Cardoso, Lucas Buk, Angelo, Simone Aldrey, Bonilha, Yasmin Pacheco Gil, Maia, Fernando, Ribeiro, Adeylson Guimarรฃes, Curado, Maria Paula, Fernandes, Gisele Aparecida, Parro, Vanderlei Cunha, Cipparrone, Flรกvio Almeida de Magalhรฃes, Filho, Alexandre Dias Porto Chiavegatto, Filho, Victor Wรผnsch, Toporcov, Tatiana Natasha
This study presents a comparative methodological analysis of six machine learning models for survival analysis (MLSA). Using data from nearly 45,000 colorectal cancer patients in the Hospital-Based Cancer Registries of Sรฃo Paulo, we evaluated Random Survival Forest (RSF), Gradient Boosting for Survival Analysis (GBSA), Survival SVM (SSVM), XGBoost-Cox (XGB-Cox), XGBoost-AFT (XGB-AFT), and LightGBM (LGBM), capable of predicting survival considering censored data. Hyperparameter optimization was performed with different samplers, and model performance was assessed using the Concordance Index (C-Index), C-Index IPCW, time-dependent AUC, and Integrated Brier Score (IBS). Survival curves produced by the models were compared with predictions from classification algorithms, and predictor interpretation was conducted using SHAP and permutation importance. XGB-AFT achieved the best performance (C-Index = 0.7618; IPCW = 0.7532), followed by GBSA and RSF. The results highlight the potential and applicability of MLSA to improve survival prediction and support decision making.
Frailty-Aware Transformer for Recurrent Survival Modeling of Driver Retention in Ride-Hailing Platforms
Xu, Shuoyan, Zhang, Yu, Miller, Eric J.
Abstract--Ride-hailing platforms are characterized by high-frequency, behavior-driven environments, such as shared mobility platforms. Although survival analysis has been widely applied to recurrent events in other domains, its use for modeling ride-hailing driver behavior remains largely unexplored. T o the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to formulate driver idle behavior as a recurrent survival process using large-scale platform data. This study proposes a survival analysis framework that uses a Transformer-based temporal encoder with causal masking to capture long-term temporal dependencies and embeds driver-specific embeddings to represent latent individual characteristics, significantly enhancing the personalized prediction of driver retention risk, modeling how historical idle sequences influence the current risk of leaving the platform via trip acceptance or log-off. The model is validated on datasets from the City of T oronto over the period January 2 to March 13, 2020. The results show that the proposed Frailty-A ware Cox Transformer (F ACT) delivers the highest time-dependent C-indices and the lowest Brier Scores across early, median, and late follow-up, demonstrating its robustness in capturing evolving risk over a driver's lifecycle. This study enables operators to optimize retention strategies and helps policy makers assess shared mobility's role in equitable and integrated transportation systems. The purpose of this study is to model the driver retention behavior through a transformer-based survival model. Shared mobility services, such as ride-hailing, car-sharing, and bike-sharing, are becoming an increasingly prominent component of contemporary transportation systems. These services are central to the broader concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) [1], which aims to integrate various forms of transport into a unified and user-centric platform.
SurvAgent: Hierarchical CoT-Enhanced Case Banking and Dichotomy-Based Multi-Agent System for Multimodal Survival Prediction
Huang, Guolin, Chen, Wenting, Yang, Jiaqi, Lyu, Xinheng, Luo, Xiaoling, Yang, Sen, Xing, Xiaohan, Shen, Linlin
Survival analysis is critical for cancer prognosis and treatment planning, yet existing methods lack the transparency essential for clinical adoption. While recent pathology agents have demonstrated explainability in diagnostic tasks, they face three limitations for survival prediction: inability to integrate multimodal data, ineffective region-of-interest exploration, and failure to leverage experiential learning from historical cases. We introduce SurvAgent, the first hierarchical chain-of-thought (CoT)-enhanced multi-agent system for multimodal survival prediction. SurvAgent consists of two stages: (1) WSI-Gene CoT-Enhanced Case Bank Construction employs hierarchical analysis through Low-Magnification Screening, Cross-Modal Similarity-Aware Patch Mining, and Confidence-Aware Patch Mining for pathology images, while Gene-Stratified analysis processes six functional gene categories. Both generate structured reports with CoT reasoning, storing complete analytical processes for experiential learning. (2) Dichotomy-Based Multi-Expert Agent Inference retrieves similar cases via RAG and integrates multimodal reports with expert predictions through progressive interval refinement. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cohorts demonstrate SurvAgent's superority over conventional methods, proprietary MLLMs, and medical agents, establishing a new paradigm for explainable AI-driven survival prediction in precision oncology.
Deep Survival Analysis of Longitudinal EHR Data for Joint Prediction of Hospitalization and Death in COPD Patients
Manzini, Enrico, Saito, Thomas Gonzalez, Escudero, Joan, Gรฉnova, Ana, Caso, Cristina, Perez-Porcuna, Tomas, Perera-Lluna, Alexandre
Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have an increased risk of hospitalizations, strongly associated with decreased survival, yet predicting the timing of these events remains challenging and has received limited attention in the literature. In this study, we performed survival analysis to predict hospitalization and death in COPD patients using longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), comparing statistical models, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) approaches. We analyzed data from more than 150k patients from the SIDIAP database in Catalonia, Spain, from 2013 to 2017, modeling hospitalization as a first event and death as a semi-competing terminal event. Multiple models were evaluated, including Cox proportional hazards, SurvivalBoost, DeepPseudo, SurvTRACE, Dynamic Deep-Hit, and Deep Recurrent Survival Machine. Results showed that DL models utilizing recurrent architectures outperformed both ML and linear approaches in concordance and time-dependent AUC, especially for hospitalization, which proved to be the harder event to predict. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to apply deep survival analysis on longitudinal EHR data to jointly predict multiple time-to-event outcomes in COPD patients, highlighting the potential of DL approaches to capture temporal patterns and improve risk stratification.