Personalized Prognostic Models for Oncology: A Machine Learning Approach
This work addresses personalized prognosis in oncology, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new data transformation.
The researchers tackled the problem of predicting cancer survival curves from right-censored SEER data by applying a data transformation to enable standard machine learning classifiers, resulting in models with AUC values ranging from 0.765 to 0.885 for binary classifiers at 6, 12, and 60 months.
We have applied a little-known data transformation to subsets of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) publically available data of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to make it suitable input to standard machine learning classifiers. This transformation properly treats the right-censored data in the SEER data and the resulting Random Forest and Multi-Layer Perceptron models predict full survival curves. Treating the 6, 12, and 60 months points of the resulting survival curves as 3 binary classifiers, the 18 resulting classifiers have AUC values ranging from .765 to .885. Further evidence that the models have generalized well from the training data is provided by the extremely high levels of agreement between the random forest and neural network models predictions on the 6, 12, and 60 month binary classifiers.