# Survival Regression¶

Often we have additional data aside from the durations, and if applicable any censorships that occurred. In the regime dataset, we have the type of government the political leader was part of, the country they were head of, and the year they were elected. Can we use this data in survival analysis?

Yes, the technique is called survival regression – the name implies we regress covariates (eg: year elected, country, etc.) against a another variable – in this case durations and lifetimes. Similar to the logic in the first part of this tutorial, we cannot use traditional methods like linear regression.

There are two popular competing techniques in survival regression: Cox’s model and Aalen’s additive model. Both models attempt to represent the hazard rate $$\lambda(t | x)$$ as a function of $$t$$ and some covariates $$x$$. In Cox’s model, the relationship is defined:

$\lambda(t | x) = b_0(t)\exp\left( b_1x_1 + ... + b_dx_d\right)$

On the other hand, Aalen’s additive model assumes the following form:

$\lambda(t | x) = b_0(t) + b_1(t)x_1 + ... + b_d(t)x_d$

Warning

This implementation is still experimental.

The estimator to fit unknown coefficients in Aalen’s additive model is located in estimators under AalenAdditiveFitter. For this exercise, we will use the regime dataset and include the categorical variables un_continent_name (eg: Asia, North America,…), the regime type (eg: monarchy, civilan,…) and the year the regime started in, start_year.

Aalen’s additive model typically does not estimate the individual $$b_i(t)$$ but instead estimates $$\int_0^t b_i(s) \; ds$$ (similar to the estimate of the hazard rate using NelsonAalenFitter above). This is important to keep in mind when analzying the output.

from lifelines import AalenAdditiveFitter

ctryname cowcode2 politycode un_region_name un_continent_name ehead leaderspellreg democracy regime start_year duration observed
Afghanistan 700 700 Southern Asia Asia Mohammad Zahir Shah Mohammad Zahir Shah.Afghanistan.1946.1952.Mona... Non-democracy Monarchy 1946 7 1
Afghanistan 700 700 Southern Asia Asia Sardar Mohammad Daoud Sardar Mohammad Daoud.Afghanistan.1953.1962.Ci... Non-democracy Civilian Dict 1953 10 1
Afghanistan 700 700 Southern Asia Asia Mohammad Zahir Shah Mohammad Zahir Shah.Afghanistan.1963.1972.Mona... Non-democracy Monarchy 1963 10 1
Afghanistan 700 700 Southern Asia Asia Sardar Mohammad Daoud Sardar Mohammad Daoud.Afghanistan.1973.1977.Ci... Non-democracy Civilian Dict 1973 5 0
Afghanistan 700 700 Southern Asia Asia Nur Mohammad Taraki Nur Mohammad Taraki.Afghanistan.1978.1978.Civi... Non-democracy Civilian Dict 1978 1 0

5 rows × 12 columns

I’m using the lovely library patsy here to create a covariance matrix from my original dataframe.

import patsy
# the '-1' term refers to not adding an intercept column (a column of all 1s).
X = patsy.dmatrix('un_continent_name + regime + start_year - 1', data, return_type='dataframe')

X.columns

['un_continent_name[Africa]',
'un_continent_name[Americas]',
'un_continent_name[Asia]',
'un_continent_name[Europe]',
'un_continent_name[Oceania]',
'regime[T.Military Dict]',
'regime[T.Mixed Dem]',
'regime[T.Monarchy]',
'regime[T.Parliamentary Dem]',
'regime[T.Presidential Dem]',
'start_year']


Below we create our fitter class. Since we did not supply an intercept column in our matrix we have included the keyword fit_intercept=True (True by default) which will append the column of ones to our matrix. (Sidenote: the intercept term, $$b_0(t)$$ in survival regression is often referred to as the baseline hazard.)

We have also included the coef_penalizer option. During the estimation, a linear regression is computed at each step. Often the regression can be unstable (due to high co-linearity or small sample sizes) – adding a penalizer term controls the stability. I recommend always starting with a small penalizer term – if the estimates still appear to be too unstable, try increasing it.

aaf = AalenAdditiveFitter(coef_penalizer=1.0, fit_intercept=True)


An instance of AalenAdditiveFitter includes a fit method that performs the inference on the coefficients. This method accepts a pandas DataFrame: each row is an individual and columns are the covariates and two special columns: a duration column and a boolean event occured column (where event occured refers to the event of interest - expulsion from government in this case)

data = lifelines.datasets.load_dd()

X['T'] = data['duration']
X['E'] = data['observed']

aaf.fit(X, 'T', event_col='E')


After fitting, the instance exposes a cumulative_hazards_ DataFrame containing the estimates of $$\int_0^t b_i(s) \; ds$$:

figsize(12.5,8)

un_continent_name[Africa] un_continent_name[Americas] un_continent_name[Asia] un_continent_name[Europe] un_continent_name[Oceania] regime[T.Military Dict] regime[T.Mixed Dem] regime[T.Monarchy] regime[T.Parliamentary Dem] regime[T.Presidential Dem] start_year baseline
-0.051595 -0.082406 0.010666 0.154493 -0.060438 0.075333 0.086274 -0.133938 0.048077 0.127171 0.000116 -0.029280
-0.014713 -0.039471 0.095668 0.194251 -0.092696 0.115033 0.358702 -0.226233 0.168783 0.121862 0.000053 0.143039
0.007389 -0.064758 0.115121 0.170549 0.069371 0.161490 0.677347 -0.271183 0.328483 0.146234 0.000004 0.297672
-0.058418 0.011399 0.091784 0.205824 0.125722 0.220028 0.932674 -0.294900 0.365604 0.422617 0.000002 0.376311
-0.099282 0.106641 0.112083 0.150708 0.091900 0.241575 1.123860 -0.391103 0.536185 0.743913 0.000057 0.362049

5 rows × 12 columns

AalenAdditiveFitter also has built in plotting:

aaf.plot(columns=['regime[T.Presidential Dem]', 'baseline', 'un_continent_name[Europe]'], iloc=slice(1,15))


Regression is most interesting if we use it on data we have not yet seen, i.e. prediction! We can use what we have learned to predict individual hazard rates, survival functions, and median survival time. The dataset we are using is aviable up until 2008, so let’s use this data to predict the (already partly seen) possible duration of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

ix = (data['ctryname'] == 'Canada') * (data['start_year'] == 2006)
harper = X.loc[ix]
print("Harper's unique data point", harper)

Harper's unique data point

array([[    0.,     0.,     1.,     0.,     0.,     0.,     0.,     1.,
0.,     0.,  2003.]])

ax = plt.subplot(2,1,1)

aaf.predict_cumulative_hazard(harper).plot(ax=ax)
ax = plt.subplot(2,1,2)

aaf.predict_survival_function(harper).plot(ax=ax);


Warning

Because of the nature of the model, estimated survival functions of individuals can increase. This is an expected artifact of Aalen’s additive model.

## Cox’s Proportional Hazard model¶

Lifelines has an implementation of the Cox propotional hazards regression model (implemented in R under coxph). The idea behind the model is that the log-hazard of an individual is a linear function of their static covariates and a population-level baseline hazard that changes over time. Mathematically:

$\lambda(t | X) = b_0(t) \exp{\left(\sum_{i=1}^d b_i x_i\right)}$

Note a few facts about this model: the only time component is in the baseline hazard, $$b_0(t)$$. In the above product, the second term is only a scalar factor that only increases or decreases the baseline hazard. Thus a change in a covariate will only increase or decrease this baseline hazard.

### Lifelines implementation¶

The implementation of the Cox model in lifelines, called CoxPHFitter has a similar API to AalensAdditiveFitter. Like R, it has a print_summary function that prints a tabular view of coefficients and related stats.

This example data is from the paper here, avaible as load_rossi in lifelines.

from lifelines.datasets import load_rossi
from lifelines import CoxPHFitter

cph = CoxPHFitter()
cph.fit(rossi_dataset, duration_col='week', event_col='arrest')

cph.print_summary()  # access the results using cph.summary

"""
n=432, number of events=114

coef  exp(coef)  se(coef)       z      p  lower 0.95  upper 0.95
fin  -0.3790     0.6845    0.1914 -1.9806 0.0476     -0.7542     -0.0039   *
age  -0.0572     0.9444    0.0220 -2.6042 0.0092     -0.1003     -0.0142  **
race  0.3141     1.3691    0.3080  1.0198 0.3078     -0.2897      0.9180
wexp -0.1511     0.8597    0.2121 -0.7124 0.4762     -0.5670      0.2647
mar  -0.4328     0.6487    0.3818 -1.1335 0.2570     -1.1813      0.3157
paro -0.0850     0.9185    0.1957 -0.4341 0.6642     -0.4687      0.2988
prio  0.0911     1.0954    0.0286  3.1824 0.0015      0.0350      0.1472  **
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Concordance = 0.640
"""


To access the coefficients and the baseline hazard directly, you can use cph.hazards_ and cph.baseline_hazard_ respectively.

### Convergence¶

Fitting the Cox model to the data involves using gradient descent. Lifelines takes extra effort to help with convergence. If you wish to see the fitting, there is a show_progress parameter in CoxPHFitter.fit function. For further help, see Problems with convergence in the Cox Proportional Hazard Model.

After fitting, the value of the maximum log-likelihood this available using cph._log_likelihood. Similarly, the score and Hessian matrix are available under _score_ and _hessian_ respectively. The _hessian_ can be used the find the covariance matrix of the coefficients.

### Goodness of fit and prediction¶

After fitting, you may want to know how “good” of a fit your model was to the data. Aside from traditional approaches, two methods the author has found useful is to 1. look at the concordance-index (see below section on Model Selection in Survival Regression), available as cph.score_ or in the print_summary and 2. compare spread between the baseline survival function vs the Kaplan Meier survival function (Why? a small spread between these two curves means that the impact of the exponential in the Cox model does very little, whereas a large spread means most of the changes in individual hazard can be attributed to the exponential term). For example, the first figure below is a good fit, and the second figure is a much weaker fit.

After fitting, you can use use the suite of prediction methods (similar to Aalen’s additve model above): .predict_partial_hazard, .predict_survival_function, etc.

cph.predict_partial_hazard(rossi_dataset.drop(["week", "arrest"], axis=1))


### Plotting the coefficients¶

With a fitted model, an altervative way to view the coefficients and their ranges is to use the plot method.

from lifelines.datasets import load_rossi
from lifelines import CoxPHFitter

cph = CoxPHFitter()
cph.fit(rossi_dataset, duration_col='week', event_col='arrest')

cph.plot()


### Checking the proportional hazards assumption¶

A quick and visual way to check the proportional hazards assumption of a variable is to plot the survival curves segmented by the values of the variable. If the survival curves are the same “shape”, and differ only by constant factor, then the assumption holds. A more clear way to see this is to plot what’s called the loglogs curve: the log(-log(survival curve)) vs log(time). If the curves are parallel (and hence do not cross each other), then it’s likely the variable satisfies the assumption. If the curves do cross, likely you’ll have to “stratify” the variable (see next section). In lifelines, the KaplanMeierFitter object has a .plot_loglogs function for this purpose.

The following is the loglogs curves of two variables in our regime dataset. The first is the democracy type, which does have (close to) parallel lines, hence satisfies our assumption:

from lifelines.datasets import load_dd
from lifelines import KaplanMeierFitter

democracy_0 = data.loc[data['democracy'] == 'Non-democracy']
democracy_1 = data.loc[data['democracy'] == 'Democracy']

kmf0 = KaplanMeierFitter()
kmf0.fit(democracy_0['duration'], event_observed=democracy_0['observed'])

kmf1 = KaplanMeierFitter()
kmf1.fit(democracy_1['duration'], event_observed=democracy_1['observed'])

fig, axes = plt.subplots()
kmf0.plot_loglogs(ax=axes)
kmf1.plot_loglogs(ax=axes)

axes.legend(['Non-democracy', 'Democracy'])

plt.show()


The second variable is the regime type, and this variable does not follow the proportional hazards assumption.

### Stratification¶

Sometimes a covariate may not obey the proportional hazard assumption. In this case, we can allow a factor to be adjusted for without estimating its effect. To specify categorical variables to be used in stratification, we specify them in the call to fit:

cph.fit(rossi_dataset, 'week', event_col='arrest', strata=['race'])

cph.print_summary()  # access the results using cph.summary

"""
n=432, number of events=114

coef  exp(coef)  se(coef)       z      p  lower 0.95  upper 0.95
fin  -0.3775     0.6856    0.1913 -1.9731 0.0485     -0.7525     -0.0024   *
age  -0.0573     0.9443    0.0220 -2.6081 0.0091     -0.1004     -0.0142  **
wexp -0.1435     0.8664    0.2127 -0.6746 0.4999     -0.5603      0.2734
mar  -0.4419     0.6428    0.3820 -1.1570 0.2473     -1.1907      0.3068
paro -0.0839     0.9196    0.1958 -0.4283 0.6684     -0.4677      0.3000
prio  0.0919     1.0962    0.0287  3.1985 0.0014      0.0356      0.1482  **
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Concordance = 0.638
"""


## Cox’s Time Varying Proportional Hazard model¶

Warning

This implementation is still experimental.

Often an individual will have a covariate change over time. An example of this is hospital patients who enter the study and, at some future time, may recieve a heart transplant. We would like to know the effect of the transplant, but we cannot condition on whether they recieved the transplant naively. Consider that if patients needed to wait at least 1 year before getting a transplant, then everyone who dies before that year is considered as a non-transplant patient, and hence this would overestimate the hazard of not recieving a transplant.

We can incorporate changes over time into our survival analysis by using a modification of the Cox model above. The general mathematical description is:

$\lambda(t | X) = b_0(t) \exp{\left(\sum_{i=1}^d b_i x_i(t)\right)}$

Note the time-varying $$x_i(t)$$ to denote that covariates can change over time. This model is implemented in lifelines as CoxTimeVaryingFitter. The dataset schema required is different than previous models, so we will spend some time describing this.

### Dataset for time-varying regression¶

Lifelines requires that the dataset be in what is called the long format. This looks like one row per state change, including an ID, the left (exclusive) time point, and right (inclusive) time point. For example, the following dataset tracks three unique subjects.

id start stop group z event
1 0 8 1 0 False
2 0 5 0 0 False
2 5 8 0 1 True
3 0 3 1 0 False
3 3 12 1 1 True

5 rows × 6 columns

In the above dataset, start and stop denote the boundaries, id is the unique identifier per subject, and event denotes if the subject died at the end of that period. For example, subject ID 2 had variable z=0 up to and including the end of time period 5 (we can think that measurements happen at end of the time period.), after which it was set to 1.

So if this is the desired dataset, it can be built up first from smaller datasets. To do this we can use some helper functions provided in lifelines.

Typically, data will be in a format that looks like it comes out of a relational database. You may have a “base” table with ids, durations, and a censorsed flag, and possibly static covariates. Ex:

id duration event var1
1 10 True 0.1
2 12 False 0.5

2 rows × 4 columns

You’ll also have secondary dataset that reference taking future measurements. Example:

id time var2
1 0 1.4
1 4 1.2
1 8 1.5
2 0 1.6

4 rows × 3 columns

where time is the duration from the entry event. Here we see subject 1 had a change in their var2 covariate at the end of time 4 and at the end of time 8. We can use to_long_format to transform the base dataset into a long format and add_covariate_to_timeline to fold the covariate dataset into the original dataset.

from lifelines.utils import to_long_format

base_df = to_long_format(base_df, duration_col="T")
df = add_covariate_to_timeline(base_df, cv, duration_col="time", id_col="id", event_col="event")

id start stop var1 var2 event
1 0 4 0.1 1.4 False
1 4 8 0.1 1.2 False
1 8 10 0.1 1.5 True
2 0 12 0.5 1.6 False

4 rows × 6 columns

From the above output, we can see that subject 1 changed state twice over the observation period, finally expiring at the end of time 10. Subject 2 was a censored case, and we lost them after time 2.

You may have multiple covariates you wish to add, so the above could be streamlined like so:
from lifelines.utils import to_long_format

base_df = to_long_format(base_df, duration_col="T")
df = base_df.pipe(add_covariate_to_timeline, cv1, duration_col="time", id_col="id", event_col="event")\


One additional flag on add_covariate_to_timeline that is of interest is the cumulative_sum flag. By default it is False, but turning it to True will perform a cumulative sum on the covariate before joining. This is useful if the covariates describe an incremental change, instead of a state update. For example, we may have measurements of drugs administered to a patient, and we want to the covariate to reflect how much we have administered since the start. In contrast, a covariate the measure the temperature of the patient is a state update. See Example cumulative total using add_covariate_to_timeline to see an example of this.

For an example of pulling datasets like this from a SQL-store, see Example SQL queries and transformations to get time varying data.

### Fitting the model and a short note on prediction¶

Once your dataset is in the correct orientation, we can use CoxTimeVaryingFitter to fit the model to your data.

from lifelines import CoxTimeVaryingFitter

ctv = CoxTimeVaryingFitter()
ctv.fit(df, id_col="id", event_col="event", start_col="start", stop_col="stop")
ctv.print_summary()
ctv.plot()


Unlike the other regression models, prediction in a time-varying setting is not possible normally. To predict, we would need to know the covariates values beyond the current time, but if we knew that, we would also know if the subject was still alive or not. For this reason, there are no prediction methods attached to CoxTimeVaryingFitter.

## Model Selection in Survival Regression¶

If censorship is present, it’s not appropriate to use a loss function like mean-squared-error or mean-absolute-loss. Instead, one measure is the concordance-index, also known as the c-index. This measure evaluates the accuracy of the ordering of predicted time. It is infact a generalization of AUC, another common loss function, and is interpreted similarly:

• 0.5 is the expected result from random predictions,
• 1.0 is perfect concordance and,
• 0.0 is perfect anti-concordance (multiply predictions with -1 to get 1.0)

The measure is implemented in lifelines under lifelines.utils.concordance_index and accepts the actual times (along with any censorships) and the predicted times.

### Cross Validation¶

Lifelines has an implementation of k-fold cross validation under lifelines.utils.k_fold_cross_validation. This function accepts an instance of a regression fitter (either CoxPHFitter of AalenAdditiveFitter), a dataset, plus k (the number of folds to perform, default 5). On each fold, it splits the data into a training set and a testing set, fits itself on the training set, and evaluates itself on the testing set (using the concordance measure).

from lifelines import CoxPHFitter