用遗传编程同时优化特征与树结构,提升生存分析模型的准确性和可解释性。
Evolving Features vs Evolving Entire Trees with GP for Interpretable Survival Analysis

- 用多目标遗传编程演化高阶特征组合,替代传统贪婪分裂。
- 在两个真实数据集上,不同深度的生存树性能均显著提升。
- 适合需要高可解释性的医疗预测场景,尤其关注模型透明度的研究者。
生存分析旨在预测事件发生的时间,常用于医学领域,处理不完整(如删失)数据。为实用,准确性与可解释性均需兼顾。生存树通过递归分割患者群体,易于理解,但通常需构建大型树以捕捉复杂关系,损害可解释性;且传统贪婪算法可能忽略全局最优分割组合,影响预测效果。浅层生存树依赖表达性强的高阶特征以达良好精度。本文采用遗传编程,多目标演化内在可检视的特征集,并研究其与不同树构建策略的交互。进一步提出联合优化树结构与非线性分裂逻辑的进化方法。实验表明,在两个真实数据集、两种不同树深度下,演化特征能显著提升各类树构建策略的预测性能。多目标演化整个树结构兼具速度与灵活表达,未来潜力更大。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event during the duration of the study. For practical use, both accuracy and interpretability are important. Survival trees are easy-to-follow survival models that split the patient cohort recursively into discrete patient groups. Whilst survival trees can capture complex relationships, they typically need to grow large, threatening interpretability. Moreover, survival trees are often built using greedy approaches that may overlook globally optimal split combinations, limiting predictive performance. Shallow survival trees require expressive, higher-order feature combinations to achieve competitive accuracy. We therefore use genetic programming to multi-objectively evolve inherently inspectable feature sets and study how they interact with different tree induction strategies. We further introduce an evolutionary approach that jointly optimises the survival tree structure and the non-linear split logic. Our findings demonstrate that evolutionary feature construction improves predictive performance across different tree induction strategies on two real-world datasets and two different survival tree depths. Given its speed and flexible presentation, the multi-objective evolution of entire trees likely holds the most future promise.
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