Conformal prediction using random survival forestsShow others and affiliations
2017 (English)In: 16th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications: Proceedings / [ed] Xuewen Chen, Bo Luo, Feng Luo, Vasile Palade, M. Arif Wani, IEEE, 2017, p. 812-817Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Random survival forests constitute a robust approach to survival modeling, i.e., predicting the probability that an event will occur before or on a given point in time. Similar to most standard predictive models, no guarantee for the prediction error is provided for this model, which instead typically is empirically evaluated. Conformal prediction is a rather recent framework, which allows the error of a model to be determined by a user specified confidence level, something which is achieved by considering set rather than point predictions. The framework, which has been applied to some of the most popular classification and regression techniques, is here for the first time applied to survival modeling, through random survival forests. An empirical investigation is presented where the technique is evaluated on datasets from two real-world applications; predicting component failure in trucks using operational data and predicting survival and treatment of heart failure patients from administrative healthcare data. The experimental results show that the error levels indeed are very close to the provided confidence levels, as guaranteed by the conformal prediction framework, and that the error for predicting each outcome, i.e., event or no-event, can be controlled separately. The latter may, however, lead to less informative predictions, i.e., larger prediction sets, in case the class distribution is heavily imbalanced.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE, 2017. p. 812-817
National Category
Computer Sciences
Research subject
Computer and Systems Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-149417DOI: 10.1109/ICMLA.2017.00-57ISI: 000425853000130ISBN: 978-1-5386-1418-1 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-149417DiVA, id: diva2:1161585
Conference
16th IEEE International Conference On Machine Learning And Applications, Cancun, Mexico, December 18-21, 2017
2017-11-302017-11-302022-02-28Bibliographically approved