Neural Frailty Machine: Beyond proportional hazard assumption in neural survival regressions

We present neural frailty machine (NFM), a powerful and flexible neural modeling framework for survival regressions. The NFM framework utilizes the classical idea of multiplicative frailty in survival analysis as a principled way of extending the proportional hazard assumption, at the same time being able to leverage the strong approximation power of neural architectures for handling nonlinear covariate dependence. Two concrete models are derived under the framework that extends neural proportional hazard models and nonparametric hazard regression models. Both models allow efficient training under the likelihood objective. Theoretically, for both proposed models, we establish statistical guarantees of neural function approximation with respect to nonparametric components via characterizing their rate of convergence. Empirically, we provide synthetic experiments that verify our theoretical statements. We also conduct experimental evaluations over 6 benchmark datasets of different scales, showing that the proposed NFM models achieve predictive performance comparable to or sometimes surpassing state-of-the-art survival models. Our code is publicly availabel at https://github.com/Rorschach1989/nfm * Equal contribution 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023).