提出正交生存学习器,解决生存数据分析中处理效应异质性难题。
Orthogonal Survival Learners for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects from Time-to-Event Data
- 基于正交化思想设计可适配任意模型的生存学习器
- 在低重叠场景下仍保持稳定,支持自定义权重函数增强鲁棒性
- 适用于随机与观察性研究中的删失生存数据,实用性强
估计异质治疗效应(HTE)对个性化决策至关重要。然而,在包含删失结果(如研究中途退出)的时间-事件数据分析中,该任务极具挑战。本文提出一套新型正交生存学习器,用于在删失条件下估计HTE。所提学习器具有三大优势:(i) 理论上保证正交性,具备优良统计性质;(ii) 可引入自定义加权函数,提升对不同低重叠情况的鲁棒性;(iii) 模型无关,可与任意机器学习模型结合。通过多种加权函数实例化,提出若干神经正交生存学习器,部分与现有方法(如DR-和R-学习器的生存版本)一致,部分为新方法,尤其针对生存重叠与删失重叠等生存场景特有低重叠问题更具鲁棒性。数值实验验证了其在各类低重叠情形下的有效性。总体而言,为随机与观察性研究中的删失时间-事件数据提供了丰富的工具箱。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) is crucial for personalized decision-making. However, this task is challenging in survival analysis, which includes time-to-event data with censored outcomes (e.g., due to study dropout). In this paper, we propose a toolbox of novel orthogonal survival learners to estimate HTEs from time-to-event data under censoring. Our learners have three main advantages: (i) we show that learners from our toolbox are guaranteed to be orthogonal and thus come with favorable theoretical properties; (ii) our toolbox allows for incorporating a custom weighting function, which can lead to robustness against different types of low overlap, and (iii) our learners are model-agnostic (i.e., they can be combined with arbitrary machine learning models). We instantiate the learners from our toolbox using several weighting functions and, as a result, propose various neural orthogonal survival learners. Some of these coincide with existing survival learners (including survival versions of the DR- and R-learner), while others are novel and further robust w.r.t. low overlap regimes specific to the survival setting (i.e., survival overlap and censoring overlap). We then empirically verify the effectiveness of our learners for HTE estimation in different low-overlap regimes through numerical experiments. In sum, we provide practitioners with a large toolbox of learners that can be used for randomized and observational studies with censored time-to-event data.
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