Survival Time Prediction of Breast Cancer Patients Using Feature Selection Algorithm Crystall

Breast cancer is one of main causes of death for women. Most of the existing survival analyses focus on the features' associations with whether the patients may survive five years or not. The personalized question remains largely unresolved about how long a breast cancer patient will live. This study aims to predict the patient-specific survival time of breast cancer patients. It formulates the personalized question into two machine learning problems. The first problem is the binary classification of whether a patient will live longer than five years or not. The second one is to build a regression model to predict the patient's survival time within five years. The methylome of a breast cancer patient is used for the prediction. A new algorithm Crystall is presented to find the methylomic features for this regression model. Our models perform well in the above two problems, and achieve the mean absolute error (MAE) of about 1 month for predicting how long a breast cancer patient will live within five years. The detected biomarker genes demonstrate close connections with breast cancers.