cs.LGFeb 25, 2026

Discovering Subgroups with Exceptional Survival Characteristics

Authors: Mhd Jawad Al Rahwanji, Sascha Xu, Nils Philipp Walter, Jilles Vreeken

Organizations: CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security Saarbrücken, Germany

Abstract

In many applications, it is important to identify subpopulations that survive longer or shorter than the rest of the population. In medicine, for example, it allows determining which patients benefit from treatment, and in predictive maintenance, which components are more likely to fail. Existing methods for discovering subgroups with exceptional survival characteristics rely on restrictive assumptions about the survival model (e.g. proportional hazards), require pre-discretized features, and, as they compare average statistics, tend to overlook individual heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose Sysurv, a non-parametric, fully differentiable method that discovers human-readable rules selecting subgroups with exceptional survival characteristics. Empirical evaluation on a wide range of datasets and settings, including a case study on cancer data, shows that Sysurv reveals insightful and actionable survival subgroups, outperforming the state of the art.

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