Neural Frailty Machine: Beyond proportional hazard assumption in neural survival regressionsWe present neural frailty machine (NFM), a powerful and flexible neural
modeling framework for survival regressions. The NFM framework utilizes the
classical idea of multiplicative frailty in survival analysis to capture
unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, at the same time being able to
leverage the strong approximation power of neural architectures for handling
nonlinear covariate dependence. Two concrete models are derived under the
framework that extends neural proportional hazard models and nonparametric
hazard regression models. Both models allow efficient training under the
likelihood objective. Theoretically, for both proposed models, we establish
statistical guarantees of neural function approximation with respect to
nonparametric components via characterizing their rate of convergence.
Empirically, we provide synthetic experiments that verify our theoretical
statements. We also conduct experimental evaluations over $6$ benchmark
datasets of different scales, showing that the proposed NFM models outperform
state-of-the-art survival models in terms of predictive performance. Our code
is publicly availabel at https://github.com/Rorschach1989/nfm
arxiv.org