Methods for a similarity measure for clinical attributes based on survival data analysis

Background Case-based reasoning is a proven method that relies on learned cases from the past for decision support of a new case. The accuracy of such a system depends on the applied similarity measure, which quantifies the similarity between two cases. This work proposes a collection of methods for similarity measures especially for comparison of clinical cases based on survival data, as they are available for example from clinical trials. Methods Our approach is intended to be used in scenarios, where it is of interest to use longitudinal data, such as survival data, for a case-based reasoning approach. This might be especially important, where uncertainty about the ideal therapy decision exists. The collection of methods consists of definitions of the local similarity of nominal as well as numeric attributes, a calculation of attribute weights, a feature selection method and finally a global similarity measure. All of them use survival time (consisting of survival status and overall survival) as a reference of similarity. As a baseline, we calculate a survival function for each value of any given clinical attribute. Results We define the similarity between values of the same attribute by putting the estimated survival functions in relation to each other. Finally, we quantify the similarity by determining the area between corresponding curves of survival functions. The proposed global similarity measure is designed especially for cases from randomized clinical trials or other collections of clinical data with survival information. Overall survival can be considered as an eligible and alternative solution for similarity calculations. It is especially useful, when similarity measures that depend on the classic solution-describing attribute “applied therapy” are not applicable. This is often the case for data from clinical trials containing randomized arms. Conclusions In silico evaluation scenarios showed that the mean accuracy of biomarker detection in k = 10 most similar cases is higher (0.909–0.998) than for competing similarity measures, such as Heterogeneous Euclidian-Overlap Metric (0.657–0.831) and Discretized Value Difference Metric (0.535–0.671). The weight calculation method showed a more than six times (6.59–6.95) higher weight for biomarker attributes over non-biomarker attributes. These results suggest that the similarity measure described here is suitable for applications based on survival data.