Survival prediction (P2P loan profitability) competitions

In a previous blog entry, see here, we discussed how survival analysis methods could be used to determine the profitability of P2P loans.  The “trick” highlighted in that previous post was to focus on the profit/loss of a loan – which in fact is what you actually care about – rather than when and if a loan defaults.  In doing so we showed that even loans that default are profitable if interest rates are high enough and the period of loan short enough.

Given that basic survival analysis methods shed light on betting strategies that could be profitable, are there more aggressive approaches that exist in the healthcare community that the financial world could take advantage of? The answer to that question is yes and it lies in using crowdsourcing as we shall now discuss.

Over recent years there has been an increase in prediction competitions in the healthcare sector.  One set of organisers have aptly named these competitions as DREAM challenges, follow this link to their website. Compared to other prediction competition websites such as Kaggle here, the winning algorithms are made publicly available through the website and also published.

A recurring theme of these competitions, that simply moves from one disease area to the next, is survival. The most recent of these involved predicting the survival of prostate cancer patients who were given a certain therapy, results were published here.  Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall but the algorithm is downloadable from the DREAM challenge website.

The winning algorithm was basically an ensemble of Cox proportional hazards regression models, we briefly explained what these are in our previous blog entry.  Those of you reading this blog who have a technical background will be thinking that doesn’t sound like an overly complicated modelling approach.  In fact it isn’t – what was sophisticated was how the winning entry partitioned the data for explorative analyses and model building.  The strategy appeared to be more important than the development of a new method.  This observation resonates with the last blog entry on Big data versus big theory.

So what does all this have to do with the financial sector? Well competitions like the one described above can quite easily be applied to financial problems, as we blogged about previously, where survival analyses are currently being applied for example to P2P loan profitability. So the healthcare prediction arena is in fact a great place to search for the latest approaches for financial betting strategies.