SurvBenchmark: comprehensive benchmarking study of survival analysis methods using both omics data and clinical data

Survival analysis is a branch of statistics that deals with both, the tracking of time and of the survival status simultaneously as the dependent response. Current comparisons of the performance of survival models mostly focus on classical clinical data with traditional statistical survival models, with prediction accuracy being often the only measurement of model performance. Moreover, survival analysis approaches for censored omics data have not been fully studied. The typical solution is to truncate survival time, to define a new status variable, and to then perform a binary classification analysis. Here, we develop a benchmarking framework that compares survival models for both clinical datasets and omics datasets, and that not only focuses on classical statistical survival models but also incorporates state-of-art ma-chine learning survival models with multiple performance evaluation measurements including model predictability, stability, flexibility and computational issues. Our comprehensive comparison framework shows that optimality is dataset and analysis method dependent. The key result is that there is no one size fits all solution for any of the criteria and any of the methods. Some methods with a high C-index suffer from computational exhaustion and instability. The implications of our framework give researchers an insight on how different survival model implementations vary over real world datasets. We highlight that care is needed when selecting methods and recommend specifically not to consider the C-index as the only performance evaluation metric as alternative metrics measure other performance aspects.