A New Method for Predicting Patient Survivorship Using Efficient Bayesian Network Learning

• Main Authors: Xia Jiang, Diyang Xue, Adam Brufsky, Seema Khan, Richard Neapolitan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2014-01-01
• Series: Cancer Informatics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4137/CIN.S13053

The purpose of this investigation is to develop and evaluate a new Bayesian network (BN)-based patient survivorship prediction method. The central hypothesis is that the method predicts patient survivorship well, while having the capability to handle high-dimensional data and be incorporated into a clinical decision support system (CDSS). We have developed EBMC_Survivorship (EBMC_S), which predicts survivorship for each year individually. EBMC_S is based on the EBMC BN algorithm, which has been shown to handle high-dimensional data. BNs have excellent architecture for decision support systems. In this study, we evaluate EBMC_S using the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) dataset, which concerns breast tumors. A 5-fold cross-validation study indicates that EMBC_S performs better than the Cox proportional hazard model and is comparable to the random survival forest method. We show that EBMC_S provides additional information such as sensitivity analyses, which covariates predict each year, and yearly areas under the ROC curve (AUROCs). We conclude that our investigation supports the central hypothesis.