Patent ID: 8010476

Claim:
A method for predicting survival rates of medical patients, said method comprising the steps of: providing a set D of survival data for a plurality of medical patients having a same condition; providing a regression model, said model having an associated parameter vector β; providing an example x 0 of a medical patient whose survival probability is to be classified; calculating a parameter vector {circumflex over (β)} that maximizes a log-likelihood function of β over the set of survival data, l(β|D), wherein the log likelihood l(β|D) is a strictly concave function of β and is a function of the scalar xβ; calculating a weight w 0 for example x 0 ; calculating an updated parameter vector β* defined as the parameter vector β that maximizes a function l(β|D∪{(y 0 ,x 0 ,w 0 )}), wherein data points (y 0 ,x 0 ,w 0 ) augment said set D; calculating a fair log likelihood ratio λ f from {circumflex over (β)} and β* using λ f =λ(β*|x 0 )+sign(λ({circumflex over (β)}|x 0 )){l({circumflex over (β)}|D)−l(β*|D)}; and mapping the fair log likelihood ratio λ f to a fair price y 0 f , wherein said fair price is a probability that class label y 0 for example x 0 has a value of 1.