Learning using privileged information (LUPI) for modeling survival data

Survival data is common in medical applications. The challenge in applying predictive data-analytic methods to survival data is in the treatment of censored observations, since the survival times for these observations are unknown. This paper presents formalization of the analysis of survival data as a binary classification problem. For this binary classification setting, we propose a strategy for encoding censored data, leading to the SVM/LUPI formulations. Further, we present empirical comparison of the new method and the classical Cox modeling approach for predictive modeling of survival data. These comparisons suggest that for data sets with large amount of censored data, the proposed method consistently yields better predictive performance than classical statistical modeling.