## A Deep Learning Approach for Survival Clustering without End-of-life Signals

Feb 15, 2018 (modified: Feb 15, 2018) ICLR 2018 Conference Blind Submission readers: everyone Show Bibtex
• Abstract: The goal of survival clustering is to map subjects (e.g., users in a social network, patients in a medical study) to $K$ clusters ranging from low-risk to high-risk. Existing survival methods assume the presence of clear \textit{end-of-life} signals or introduce them artificially using a pre-defined timeout. In this paper, we forego this assumption and introduce a loss function that differentiates between the empirical lifetime distributions of the clusters using a modified Kuiper statistic. We learn a deep neural network by optimizing this loss, that performs a soft clustering of users into survival groups. We apply our method to a social network dataset with over 1M subjects, and show significant improvement in C-index compared to alternatives.
• TL;DR: The goal of survival clustering is to map subjects into clusters. Without end-of-life signals, this is a challenging task. To address this task we propose a new loss function by modifying the Kuiper statistics.
• Keywords: Survival Analysis, Kuiper statistics, model-free