High-dimensional iterative variable selection for accelerated failure time models

Abstract: We propose an iterative variable selection method for the accelerated failure time model using high-dimensional survival data. Our method pioneers the use of the recently proposed structured screen-and-select framework for survival analysis. We use the marginal utility as the measure of association to inform the structured screening process. For the selection steps, we use Bayesian model selection based on non-local priors. We compare the proposed method with a few well-known methods. Assessment in terms of true positive rate and false discovery rate shows the usefulness of our method. We have implemented the method within the R package GWASinlps.