XGBLC: an improved survival prediction model based on XGBoost

Motivation: Survival analysis using gene expression profiles plays a crucial role in the interpretation of clinical research and assessment of disease therapy programs. Several prediction models have been developed to explore the relationship between patients' covariates and survival. However, the high-dimensional genomic features limit the prediction performance of the survival model. Thus, an accurate and reliable prediction model is necessary for survival analysis using high-dimensional genomic data. Results: In this study, we proposed an improved survival prediction model based on XGBoost framework called XGBLC, which used Lasso-Cox to enhance the ability to analyze high-dimensional genomic data. The novel first- and second-order gradient statistics of Lasso-Cox were defined to construct the loss function of XGBLC. We extensively tested our XGBLC algorithm on both simulated and real-world datasets, and estimated the performance of models with 5-fold cross-validation. Based on 20 cancer datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), XGBLC outperforms five state-of-the-art survival methods in terms of C-index, Brier score and AUC. The results show that XGBLC still keeps good accuracy and robustness by comparing the performance on the simulated datasets with different scales. The developed prediction model would be beneficial for physicians to understand the effects of patient's genomic characteristics on survival and make personalized treatment decisions.

Automated summary

This study proposed an improved survival prediction model XGBLC based on the XGBoost framework, using Lasso-Cox to enhance the ability to analyze high-dimensional genomic data. Tested on 20 cancer datasets, XGBLC outperforms five state-of-the-art survival methods in terms of C-index, Brier score, and AUC.