Using multiple classifiers for predicting the risk of endovascular aortic aneurysm repair re-intervention through hybrid feature selection.

Feature selection is essential in medical area; however, its process becomes complicated with the presence of censoring which is the unique character of survival analysis. Most survival feature selection methods are based on Cox's proportional hazard model, though machine learning classifiers are preferred. They are less employed in survival analysis due to censoring which prevents them from directly being used to survival data. Among the few work that employed machine learning classifiers, partial logistic artificial neural network with auto-relevance determination is a well-known method that deals with censoring and perform feature selection for survival data. However, it depends on data replication to handle censoring which leads to unbalanced and biased prediction results especially in highly censored data. Other methods cannot deal with high censoring. Therefore, in this article, a new hybrid feature selection method is proposed which presents a solution to high level censoring. It combines support vector machine, neural network, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers using simple majority voting and a new weighted majority voting method based on survival metric to construct a multiple classifier system. The new hybrid feature selection process uses multiple classifier system as a wrapper method and merges it with iterated feature ranking filter method to further reduce features. Two endovascular aortic repair datasets containing 91% censored patients collected from two centers were used to construct a multicenter study to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results showed the proposed technique outperformed individual classifiers and variable selection methods based on Cox's model such as Akaike and Bayesian information criterions and least absolute shrinkage and selector operator in p values of the log-rank test, sensitivity, and concordance index. This indicates that the proposed classifier is more powerful in correctly predicting the risk of re-intervention enabling doctor in selecting patients' future follow-up plan

Towards Flexible Time-to-event Modeling: Optimizing Neural Networks via Rank Regression

Time-to-event analysis, also known as survival analysis, aims to predict the time of occurrence of an event, given a set of features. One of the major challenges in this area is dealing with censored data, which can make learning algorithms more complex. Traditional methods such as Cox's proportional hazards model and the accelerated failure time (AFT) model have been popular in this field, but they often require assumptions such as proportional hazards and linearity. In particular, the AFT models often require pre-specified parametric distributional assumptions. To improve predictive performance and alleviate strict assumptions, there have been many deep learning approaches for hazard-based models in recent years. However, representation learning for AFT has not been widely explored in the neural network literature, despite its simplicity and interpretability in comparison to hazard-focused methods. In this work, we introduce the Deep AFT Rank-regression model for Time-to-event prediction (DART). This model uses an objective function based on Gehan's rank statistic, which is efficient and reliable for representation learning. On top of eliminating the requirement to establish a baseline event time distribution, DART retains the advantages of directly predicting event time in standard AFT models. The proposed method is a semiparametric approach to AFT modeling that does not impose any distributional assumptions on the survival time distribution. This also eliminates the need for additional hyperparameters or complex model architectures, unlike existing neural network-based AFT models. Through quantitative analysis on various benchmark datasets, we have shown that DART has significant potential for modeling high-throughput censored time-to-event data.Comment: Accepted at ECAI 202

Survival ensembles by the sum of pairwise differences with application to lung cancer microarray studies

Lung cancer is among the most common cancers in the United States, in terms of incidence and mortality. In 2009, it is estimated that more than 150,000 deaths will result from lung cancer alone. Genetic information is an extremely valuable data source in characterizing the personal nature of cancer. Over the past several years, investigators have conducted numerous association studies where intensive genetic data is collected on relatively few patients compared to the numbers of gene predictors, with one scientific goal being to identify genetic features associated with cancer recurrence or survival. In this note, we propose high-dimensional survival analysis through a new application of boosting, a powerful tool in machine learning. Our approach is based on an accelerated lifetime model and minimizing the sum of pairwise differences in residuals. We apply our method to a recent microarray study of lung adenocarcinoma and find that our ensemble is composed of 19 genes, while a proportional hazards (PH) ensemble is composed of nine genes, a proper subset of the 19-gene panel. In one of our simulation scenarios, we demonstrate that PH boosting in a misspecified model tends to underfit and ignore moderately-sized covariate effects, on average. Diagnostic analyses suggest that the PH assumption is not satisfied in the microarray data and may explain, in part, the discrepancy in the sets of active coefficients. Our simulation studies and comparative data analyses demonstrate how statistical learning by PH models alone is insufficient.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS426 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Modeling Big Medical Survival Data Using Decision Tree Analysis with Apache Spark

In many medical studies, an outcome of interest is not only whether an event occurred, but when an event occurred; and an example of this is Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Identifying patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) who are likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is highly important for AD treatment. Previous studies suggest that not all MCI patients will convert to AD. Massive amounts of data from longitudinal and extensive studies on thousands of Alzheimer’s patients have been generated. Building a computational model that can predict conversion form MCI to AD can be highly beneficial for early intervention and treatment planning for AD. This work presents a big data model that contains machine-learning techniques to determine the level of AD in a participant and predict the time of conversion to AD. The proposed framework considers one of the widely used screening assessment for detecting cognitive impairment called Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). MoCA data set was collected from different centers and integrated into our large data framework storage using a Hadoop Data File System (HDFS); the data was then analyzed using an Apache Spark framework. The accuracy of the proposed framework was compared with a semi-parametric Cox survival analysis model