On the Use of C-index for Stratified and Cross-Validated Cox Model

Abstract: We develop a baseline-adjusted C-index to evaluate fitted Cox proportional hazard models. This metric is particularly useful in evaluating stratified Cox models, as well as model selection using cross validation. Our metric is able to compare all pairs of comparable individuals in strata or cross validation folds, as opposed to only pairs within the same stratum/folds. We demonstrate through simulations and real data applications that the baseline adjusted C-index is more stable and that it selects better model in high-dimensional $L^1$ penalized Cox regression.