Abstract:
A new model for generating survival trajectories è data based on applying an autoencoder of a specific structure is proposed. It solves three tasks. First, it provides predictions in the form of the expected event time è the survival function for a new generated feature vector based on the Beran estimator. Second, the model generates additional data based on a given training set that would supplement the original dataset. Third, the most important, it generates a prototype time-dependent trajectory for an object, which characterizes how features of the object could be changed to achieve a different time to an event. The trajectory can be viewed as a type of the counterfactual explanation. The proposed model is robust during training è inference due to a specific weighting scheme incorporating into the variational autoencoder. The model also determines the censored indicators of new generated data by solving a classification task. The paper demonstrates the efficiency è properties of the proposed model using numerical experiments on synthetic è real datasets. The code of the algorithm implementing the proposed model is publicly available.
Keywords:survival analysis, Beran estimator, variational autoencoder, data generation, time-dependent trajectory.