Cross validation approaches for penalized Cox regression

Abstract: Cross validation is commonly used for selecting tuning parameters in penalized regression, but its use in penalized Cox regression models has received relatively little attention in the literature. Due to its partial likelihood construction, carrying out cross validation for Cox models is not straightforward, and there are several potential approaches for implementation. Here, we propose two new cross-validation methods for Cox regression and compare them to approaches that have been proposed elsewhere. Our proposed approach of cross-validating the linear predictors seems to offer an attractive balance of performance and numerical stability. We illustrate these advantages using simulated data as well as using them to analyze data from a high-dimensional study of survival in lung cancer patients.