As in many fields of medical research, survival analysis has witnessed a growing interest in the application of deep learning techniques to model complex, high-dimensional, heterogeneous, incomplete, and censored medical data. Current methods often make assumptions about the relations between data that may not be valid in practice. In response, we introduce SAVAE (Survival Analysis Variational Autoencoder), a novel approach based on Variational Autoencoders. SAVAE contributes significantly to the field by introducing a tailored ELBO formulation for survival analysis, supporting various parametric distributions for covariates and survival time (as long as the log-likelihood is differentiable). It offers a general method that consistently performs well on various metrics, demonstrating robustness and stability through different experiments. Our proposal effectively estimates time-to-event, accounting for censoring, covariate interactions, and time-varying risk associations. We validate our model in diverse datasets, including genomic, clinical, and demographic data, with varying levels of censoring. This approach demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, as assessed by the Concordance Index and the Integrated Brier Score. SAVAE also offers an interpretable model that parametrically models covariates and time. Moreover, its generative architecture facilitates further applications such as clustering, data imputation, and the generation of synthetic patient data through latent space inference from survival data.

通过使用深度学习技术中的变分自动编码器，本研究提出了一种名为SAVAE的新方法，用于生存分析及相关领域，能够适应复杂、高维、异构以及包含缺失和截尾数据的场景，并表现出稳健性和稳定性。同时，该方法还能够进行数据插补，并通过潜变量推断生成合成患者数据。

SAVAE：利用变分贝叶斯自编码器进行生存分析