We have compared the performance across three of the most popular deep learning architectures - Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) while comparing the performing of deep learning models against traditional machine learning models. The data was obtained from the lung cancer section of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) cancer registry.
The deep learning models outperformed traditional machine learning models across both classification and regression approaches. We obtained a best of 71.18 % accuracy for the classification approach when patients\' survival periods are segmented into classes of \'<=6 months\',\' 0.5 - 2 years\' and \'>2 years\' and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 13.5 % andR2 value of 0.5 for the regression approach for the deep learning models while the traditional machine learning models saturated at 61.12 % classification accuracy and 14.87 % RMSE in regression.
This approach can be a baseline for early prediction with predictions that can be further improved with more temporal treatment information collected from treated patients. In addition, we evaluated the feature importance to investigate the model interpretability, gaining further insight into the survival analysis models and the factors that are important in cancer survival period prediction.