# FederatedRSF : Federated Random Survival Forests for Partially Overlapping Medical Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Federated Learning: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10616/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FedDRAW: Federated Dual Reputation Annealing Weighting for Heterogeneous Multi-Institutional Chest Radiograph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05223/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-center survival prediction can improve robustness and generalizability, yet privacy regulations and institutional governance often prevent pooling patient-level clinical and genomic data across institutions. In practice, deployment is further complicated by feature-space heterogeneity, in which sites collect different covariates or use different sequencing panels, resulting in only partially overlapping feature sets. We present FederatedRSF, a Python package that implements federated random survival forests, aggregating locally trained survival trees and redistributing only feature-compatible trees to each site, enabling inference with partial overlap without sharing raw data. We evaluate FederatedRSF on the GBSG2 breast cancer cohort distributed with the scikit-survival package, simulating feature heterogeneity across clients by withholding subsets of features, and assessing discrimination using Harrell's concordance index (C-Index) under repeated cross-validation and site-splits. The results demonstrated that the federated model can achieve performance comparable to that of the centralized training setting.