An Investigation Into Feature Selection for Oncological Survival Prediction

In machine learning based clinical decision support (CDS) systems the features used to train prediction models are of paramount importance. Strong features will lead to accurate models, whereas as weak features will have the opposite effect. Feature sets can either be designed by domain experts, or automatically extracted for unstructured data that happens to be available from some process other than a CDS system. This paper compares the usefulness of structured expert-designed features to features extracted from unstructured data sources in an oncological survival prediction application scenario.