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Building cancer prognosis systems with survival function clusters
Author(s) -
Muñoz Johanna,
Murua Alejandro
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
statistical analysis and data mining: the asa data science journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.381
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1932-1872
pISSN - 1932-1864
DOI - 10.1002/sam.11373
Subject(s) - homogeneous , cluster analysis , computer science , cancer , lung cancer , cluster (spacecraft) , population , medicine , covariate , demographics , survival analysis , data mining , oncology , artificial intelligence , mathematics , machine learning , demography , environmental health , combinatorics , sociology , programming language
In oncology, risk groups are usually constructed by dividing the population in blocks of patients with similar health conditions and demographics levels. Even for a handful of factors, the number of risk groups may be large, which complicates the analyses. There is a need to cluster together homogeneous blocks of patients into larger entities with similar survival characteristics. We develop and compare several techniques to detect these patient meta‐blocks. Our prognosis systems are based on the integrated absolute distance between the survival functions associated with patient blocks. We propose the use of vectorization of survival curves and of principled ensemble algorithms for clustering. We test these methods on different complexity scenarios. The best performing methods are then used to create prognosis systems for the NCIC lung cancer database, a longitudinal study of the U.S. lung cancer patients who were followed from 1988 to 2009.