Random Forest Modeling for Survival Analysis of Cancer Recurrences

The recurrence of breast cancer is a prevailing problem that decreases the quality of patients’ lives, creates high burdens on the healthcare system, and impacts the wellbeing of society. Advanced sensing provides an unprecedented opportunity to increase information visibility and characterize patterns of event occurrences. However, few, if any, of previous works have investigated survival analysis of breast cancer recurrences based on large amount of data readily available in the health system. There is a dire need to leverage data to decipher important factors that play a role in the recurrence of breast cancer. This paper presents an ensemble method of random survival forest for time-to-event analysis of breast cancer recurrences in the surveillance, epidemiology, and end results (SEER) data from year 1973 to 2015. Our model characterizes the survival function among patients with and without recurrences of breast cancer. Ensemble models are constructed via sampling and bootstrapping into the big data. Experimental results show that the age when cancer recurrence happens and time-between-recurrences approximately follow the Gaussian and exponential distributions with the means of $61.35 \pm 14.03$ and 2.61 years, respectively. In addition, the results show age, surgery status, stage of tumors, and histological grade are significant factors that influence the probability of breast cancer recurrences. The proposed survival analysis approach shows strong potentials to help healthcare practitioners in prognosis, treatment, and decision-making of breast cancer recurrences.