DeepWei-Cu: A Deep Weibull Network for Cure Fraction Models

Abstract

Introduction: Survival analysis including cure fraction subgroups is heavily used in different fields like economics, engineering and medicine. The main core of the analysis is to understand the relationship between the covariates and the survival function taking into consideration censoring and long-term survival. The analysis can be performed using traditional statistical models or neural networks. Recently, neural network has attracted attention in analyzing lifetime data due to its ability of efficiently estimating the survival function under the existence of complex covariates. The goal of this study is to develop a parametric neural network that can sufficiently predict survival data with cure fraction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a parametric neural network is introduced to analyze mixture cure fraction models.

Methods: In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network based on mixture cure fraction Weibull loss function. Results: Alzheimer disease dataset as long as synthetic dataset are used to study the efficiency of the model. We compared the results using goodness of fit methods in both datasets with Weibull regression.

Conclusion: The proposed neural network has the flexibility of analyzing continuous data without discretization. Also, it has the advantage of using Weibull distribution properties. For example, it can analyze data with different hazard rates (monotonically decreasing, monotonically increasing and constant). Comparing the results with Weibull regression, the proposed neural network performed better.