Posterior Consistency for a Non-parametric Survival Model under a Gaussian Process Prior

Abstract

In this paper, we prove almost surely consistency of a Survival Analysis model, which puts a Gaussian process, mapped to the unit interval, as a prior on the so-called hazard function. We assume our data is given by survival lifetimes $T$ belonging to $\mathbb{R}^{+}$, and covariates on $[0,1]^d$, where $d$ is an arbitrary dimension. We define an appropriate metric for survival functions and prove posterior consistency with respect to this metric. Our proof is based on an extension of the theorem of Schwartz (1965), which gives general conditions for proving almost surely consistency in the setting of non i.i.d random variables. Due to the nature of our data, several results for Gaussian processes on $\mathbb{R}^+$ are proved which may be of independent interest.