scikit-survival: machine learning for time-to-event analysis

scikit-survival is a Python module for survival analysis built on top of scikit-learn. It allows doing survival analysis while utilizing the power of scikit-learn, e.g., for pre-processing or doing cross-validation.

About Survival Analysis

The objective in survival analysis (also referred to as reliability analysis in engineering) is to establish a connection between covariates and the time of an event. What makes survival analysis differ from traditional machine learning is the fact that parts of the training data can only be partially observed – they are censored.

For instance, in a clinical study, patients are often monitored for a particular time period, and events occurring in this particular period are recorded. If a patient experiences an event, the exact time of the event can be recorded – the patient’s record is uncensored. In contrast, right censored records refer to patients that remained event-free during the study period and it is unknown whether an event has or has not occurred after the study ended. Consequently, survival analysis demands for models that take this unique characteristic of such a dataset into account.

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Sebastian Pölsterl
AI Researcher

My research interests include machine learning for time-to-event analysis, causal inference and biomedical applications.

Publications

scikit-survival: A Library for Time-to-Event Analysis Built on Top of scikit-learn

scikit-survival is an open-source Python package for time-to-event analysis fully compatible with scikit-learn. It provides implementations of many popular machine learning techniques for time-to-event analysis, including penalized Cox model, Random Survival Forest, and Survival Support Vector Machine. In addition, the library includes tools to evaluate model performance on censored time-to-event data. The documentation contains installation instructions, interactive notebooks, and a full description of the API. scikit-survival is distributed under the GPL-3 license with the source code and detailed instructions available at https://github.com/sebp/scikit-survival