Efficient Training of Probabilistic Neural Networks for Survival Analysis

Variational Inference (VI) is a commonly used technique for approximate Bayesian inference and uncertainty estimation in deep learning models, yet it comes at a computational cost, as it doubles the number of trainable parameters to represent uncertainty. This rapidly becomes challenging in high-dimensional settings and motivates the use of alternative techniques for inference, such as Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD) or Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Process (SNGP). However, such methods have seen little adoption in survival analysis, and VI remains the prevalent approach for training probabilistic neural networks. In this paper, we investigate how to train deep probabilistic survival models in large datasets without introducing additional overhead in model complexity. To achieve this, we adopt three probabilistic approaches, namely VI, MCD, and SNGP, and evaluate them in terms of their prediction performance, calibration performance, and model complexity. In the context of probabilistic survival analysis, we investigate whether non-VI techniques can offer comparable or possibly improved prediction performance and uncertainty calibration compared to VI. In the MIMIC-IV dataset, we find that MCD aligns with VI in terms of the concordance index (0.748 vs. 0.743) and mean absolute error (254.9 vs. 254.7) using hinge loss, while providing C-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Moreover, our SNGP implementation provides D-calibrated survival functions in all datasets compared to VI (4/4 vs. 2/4, respectively). Our work encourages the use of techniques alternative to VI for survival analysis in high-dimensional datasets, where computational efficiency and overhead are of concern.