{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/variational-learning-of-individual-survival","title":"Variational Learning of Individual Survival Distributions","arxiv_id":"2003.04430","date":"2020-03-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zidi Xiu","Chenyang Tao","Benjamin A. Goldstein","Ricardo Henao"],"abstract":"The abundance of modern health data provides many opportunities for the use of machine learning techniques to build better statistical models to improve clinical decision making. Predicting time-to-event distributions, also known as survival analysis, plays a key role in many clinical applications. We introduce a variational time-to-event prediction model, named Variational Survival Inference (VSI), which builds upon recent advances in distribution learning techniques and deep neural networks. VSI addresses the challenges of non-parametric distribution estimation by ($i$) relaxing the restrictive modeling assumptions made in classical models, and ($ii$) efficiently handling the censored observations, {\\it i.e.}, events that occur outside the observation window, all within the variational framework. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, an extensive set of experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets is carried out, showing improved performance relative to competing solutions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04430v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.04430v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"variational-learning-of-individual-survival","repo_url":"https://github.com/ZidiXiu/VSI","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"survival-analysis","task_name":"Survival Analysis"},{"task_slug":"time-to-event-prediction","task_name":"Time-to-Event Prediction"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}