PAR2COX: Survival-Informed Tensor Decomposition for Phenotyping and Risk Prediction from Irregular Longitudinal Data

Abstract

Accurate risk prediction is crucial for clinical-decision making, intervention planning, treatment and transplant allocation. However, longitudinal clinical data are often irregular and subject to censoring. We propose PAR2COX, a joint framework that integrates PARAFAC2 decomposition with Cox proportional hazards model, using patient-specific latent factors as covariates in the likelihood. The proposed alternating optimization framework jointly estimates phenotypes and survival parameters, enabling survival-guided representation learning. PAR2COX accommodates both historical patients with observed outcomes and current patients whose outcomes remain unknown. Numerical experiments and a case study based on MIMIC-IV data demonstrate improved risk stratification compared with existing approaches, highlighting the value of survival-informed phenotype learning.