Artificial neural networks in identifying areas with homogeneous survival time

Abstract

In the paper an artificial neural network designed for prediction of survival time is presented. The method aims at identifying areas in the feature space homogeneous from the point of view of survival experience. The proposed method is based on minimization of a piecewise linear function. Appropriately designed dipolar criterion function is able to cope with censored data. Additional pruning phase prevents the network from over-fitting.