Asymmetric Graph-Guided Multitask Survival Analysis With Self-Paced Learning.

Abstract

Recently, multitask learning has been successfully applied to survival analysis problems. A critical challenge in real-world survival analysis tasks is that not all instances and tasks are equally learnable. A survival analysis model can be improved when considering the complexities of instances and tasks during the model training. To this end, we propose an asymmetric graph-guided multitask learning approach with self-paced learning for survival analysis applications. The proposed model is able to improve the learning performance by identifying the complex structure among tasks and considering the complexities of training instances and tasks during the model training. Especially, by incorporating the self-paced learning strategy and asymmetric graph-guided regularization, the proposed model is able to learn the model in a progressive way from "easy" to "hard" loss function items. In addition, together with the self-paced learning function, the asymmetric graph-guided regularization allows the related knowledge transfer from one task to another in an asymmetric way. Consequently, the knowledge acquired from those earlier learned tasks can help to solve complex tasks effectively. The experimental results on both synthetic and real-world TCGA data suggest that the proposed method is indeed useful for improving survival analysis and achieves higher prediction accuracies than the previous state-of-the-art methods.