Download or read book The Statistical Analysis of Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Jianguo Sun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-05-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects and unifies statistical models and methods that have been proposed for analyzing interval-censored failure time data. It provides the first comprehensive coverage of the topic of interval-censored data and complements the books on right-censored data. The focus of the book is on nonparametric and semiparametric inferences, but it also describes parametric and imputation approaches. This book provides an up-to-date reference for people who are conducting research on the analysis of interval-censored failure time data as well as for those who need to analyze interval-censored data to answer substantive questions.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Alicia Worrall and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, we will examine the statistical methods used in survival analysis applied to interval-censored failure time data. Interval-censored data is not widely used due to the fact that it is more difficult to work with. However, the same methods commonly used for random- censoring can be applied to interval-censoring as well. This includes finding the basic quantities, survival curves, regression analysis, Bayesian regression analysis and a comparison between interval-censored data and random-censored data.
Download or read book Interval Censored Time to Event Data written by Ding-Geng (Din) Chen and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data: Methods and Applications collects the most recent techniques, models, and computational tools for interval-censored time-to-event data. Top biostatisticians from academia, biopharmaceutical industries, and government agencies discuss how these advances are impacting clinical trials and biomedical research.Divid
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Multivariate Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Man-Hua Chen and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A voluminous literature on right-censored failure time data has been developed in the past 30 years. Due to advances in biomedical research, interval censoring has become increasingly common in medical follow-up studies. In these cases, each study subject is examined or observed periodically, thus the observed failure time falls into a certain interval. Additional problems arise in the analysis of multivariate interval-censored failure time data. These include the estimating the correlation among failure times. The first part of this dissertation considers regression analysis of multivariate interval-censored failure time data using the proportional odds model. One situation in which the proportional odds model is preferred is when the covariate effects diminish over time. In contrast, if the proportional hazards model is applied for the situation, one may have to deal with time-dependent covariates. We present an inference approach for fitting the model to multivariate interval-censored failure time data. Simulation studies are conducted and an AIDS clinical trial is analyzed by using this methodology. The second part of this dissertation is devoted to the additive hazards model for multivariate interval-censored failure time data. In many applications, the proportional hazards model may not be appropriate and the additive hazards model provides an important and useful alternative. The presented estimates of regression parameters are consistent and asymptotically normal and a robust estimate of their covariance matrix is given that takes into account the correlation of the survival variables. Simulation studies are conducted for practical situations. The third part of this dissertation discusses regression analysis of multivariate interval censored failure time data using the frailty model approach. Based on the most commonly used regression model, the proportional hazards model, the frailty model approach considers the random effect directly models the correlation between multivariate failure times. For the analysis, we will focus on current status or case I interval-censored data and the maximum likelihood approach is developed for inference. The simulation studies are conducted to asses and compare the finite-sample behaviors of the estimators and we apply the proposed method to an animal tumorigenicity experiment.
Download or read book Regression Analysis of Interval censored Failure Time Data with Non Proportional Hazards Models written by Han Zhang (Graduate of University of Missouri) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interval-censored failure time data arises when the failure time of interest is known only to lie within an interval or window instead of being observed exactly. Many clinical trials and longitudinal studies may generate interval-censored data. One common area that often produces such data is medical or health studies with periodic follow-ups, in which the medical condition of interest such as the onset of a disease is only known to occur between two adjacent examination times. An important special case of interval-censored data is the so-called current status data when each study subject is observed only once for the status of the event of interest. That is, instead of observing the survival endpoint directly, we will only know the observation time and whether or not the event of interest has occurred by that time. Such data may occur in many fields as cross-sectional studies and tumorigenicity experiments. Sometimes we also refer current status data as case I interval-censored data and the general case as case II interval-censored data. Recently the semi-parametric statistical analysis of both case I and case II intervalcensored failure time data has attracted a great deal of attention. Many procedures have been proposed for their regression analysis under various models. We will describe the structure of interval-censored data in Chapter 1 and provides two specific examples. Also some special situations like informative censoring and failure time data with missing covariates are discussed. Besides, a brief review of the literature on some important topics, including nonparametric estimation and regression analysis are performed. However, there are still a number of problems that remain unsolved or lack approaches that are simpler, more efficient and could apply to more general situations compared to the existing ones. For regression analysis of interval-censored data, many approaches have been proposed and more specifically most of them are developed for the widely used proportional hazards model. The research in this dissertation focuses on the statistical analysis on non-proportional hazards models. In Chapter 2 we will discuss the regression analysis of interval-censored failure time data with possibly crossing hazards. For the problem of crossing hazards, people assume that the hazard functions with two samples considered may cross each other where most of the existing approaches cannot deal with such situation. Many authors has provided some efficient methods on right-censored failure time data, but little articles could be found on interval-censored data. By applying the short-term and long-term hazard ratio model, we develop a spline-based maximum likelihood estimation procedure to deal with this specific situation. In the method, a splined-based sieve estimation are used to approximate the underlying unknown function. The proposed estimators are shown to be strongly consistent and the asymptotic normality of the estimators of regression parameters are also shown to be true. In addition, we also provided a Cramer-Raw type of criterion to do the model validation. Simulation study was conducted for the assessment of the finite sample properties of the presented procedure and suggests that the method seems to work well for practical situations. Also an illustrative example using a data set from a tumor study is provided. As we discussed in Chapter 1, several semi-parametric and non-parametric methods have been proposed for the analysis of current status data. However, most of them only deal with the situation where observation time is independent of the underlying survival time. In Chapter 3, we consider regression analysis of current status data with informative observation times in additive hazards model. In many studies, the observation time may be correlated to the underlying failure time of interest, which is often referred to as informative censoring. Several authors have discussed the problem and in particular, an estimating equation-based approach for fitting current status data to additive hazards model has been proposed previously when informative censoring occurs. However, it is well known that such procedure may not be efficient and to address this, we propose a sieve maximum likelihood procedure. In particular, an EM algorithm is developed and the resulting estimators of regression parameters are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. An extensive simulation study was conducted for the assessment of the finite sample properties of the presented procedure and suggests that it seems to work well for practical situations. An application to a tumorigenicity experiment is also provided. In Chapter 4, we considered another special case under the additive hazards model, case II interval-censored data with possibly missing covariates. In many areas like demographical, epidemiological, medical and sociological studies, a number of nonparametric or semi-parametric methods have been developed for interval-censored data when the covariates are complete. However, it is well-known that in reality some covariates may suffer missingness due to various reasons, data with missing covariates could be very common in these areas. In the case of missing covariates, a naive method is clearly the complete-case analysis, which deletes the cases or subjects with missing covariates. However, it's apparent that such analysis could result in loss of efficiency and furthermore may lead to biased estimation. To address this, we propose the inverse probability weighted method and reweighting approach to estimate the regression parameters under the additive hazards model when some of the covariates are missing at random. The resulting estimators of regression parameters are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Several numerical results suggest that the proposed method works well in practical situations. Also an application to a health survey is provided. Several directions for future research are discussed in Chapter 5.
Download or read book Survival Analysis with Interval Censored Data written by Kris Bogaerts and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survival Analysis with Interval-Censored Data: A Practical Approach with Examples in R, SAS, and BUGS provides the reader with a practical introduction into the analysis of interval-censored survival times. Although many theoretical developments have appeared in the last fifty years, interval censoring is often ignored in practice. Many are unaware of the impact of inappropriately dealing with interval censoring. In addition, the necessary software is at times difficult to trace. This book fills in the gap between theory and practice. Features: -Provides an overview of frequentist as well as Bayesian methods. -Include a focus on practical aspects and applications. -Extensively illustrates the methods with examples using R, SAS, and BUGS. Full programs are available on a supplementary website. The authors: Kris Bogaerts is project manager at I-BioStat, KU Leuven. He received his PhD in science (statistics) at KU Leuven on the analysis of interval-censored data. He has gained expertise in a great variety of statistical topics with a focus on the design and analysis of clinical trials. Arnošt Komárek is associate professor of statistics at Charles University, Prague. His subject area of expertise covers mainly survival analysis with the emphasis on interval-censored data and classification based on longitudinal data. He is past chair of the Statistical Modelling Society and editor of Statistical Modelling: An International Journal. Emmanuel Lesaffre is professor of biostatistics at I-BioStat, KU Leuven. His research interests include Bayesian methods, longitudinal data analysis, statistical modelling, analysis of dental data, interval-censored data, misclassification issues, and clinical trials. He is the founding chair of the Statistical Modelling Society, past-president of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, and fellow of ISI and ASA.
Download or read book Semi parametric Regression Analysis of Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Ling Ma and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By interval-censored data, we mean that the failure time of interest is known only to lie within an interval instead of being observed exactly. Many clinical trials and longitudinal studies may generate interval-censored data. One common example occurs in medical or health studies that entail periodic follow-ups. An important special case of interval-censored data is the so called current status data when each subject is observed only once for the status of the occurrence of the event of interest. That is, instead of observing the survival endpoint directly, we only know the observation time and whether or not the event of interest has occurred at that time. Such data may occur in many fields, for example, cross-sectional studies and tumorigenicity experiments. Sometimes we also refer current status data to as case I interval-censored data and the general case as case II interval-censored data. In the following, for simplicity, we will refer current status data and interval-censored data to case I and case II interval-censored data, respectively. The statistical analysis of both case I and case II interval-censored failure time data has recently attracted a great deal of attention and especially, many procedures have been proposed for their regression analysis under various models. However, due to the strict restrictions of existing regression analysis procedures and practical demands, new methodologies for regression analysis need to be developed. For regression analysis of interval-censored data, many approaches have been proposed and for most of them, the inference is carried out based on the asymptotic normality. It's well known that the symmetric property implied by the normal distribution may not be appropriate sometimes and could underestimate the variance of estimated parameters. In the first part of this dissertation, we adopt the linear transformation models for regression analysis of interval-censored data and propose an empirical likelihood-based procedure to address the underestimating problem from using symmetric property implied by the normal distribution of the parameter estimates. Simulation and analysis of a real data set are conducted to assess the performance of the procedure. The second part of this dissertation discusses regression analysis of current status data under additive hazards models. In this part, we focus on the situation when some covariates could be missing or cannot be measured exactly due to various reasons. Furthermore, for missing covariates, there may exist some related information such as auxiliary covariates (Zhou and Pepe, 1995). We propose an estimated partial likelihood approach for estimation of regression parameters that make use of the available auxiliary information. To assess the finite sample performance of the proposed method, an extensive simulation study is conducted and indicates that the method works well in practical situations. Several semi-parametric and non-parametric methods have been proposed for the analysis of current status data. However, most of these methods deal only with the situation where observation time is independent of the underlying survival time completely or given covariates. The third part of this dissertation discusses regression analysis of current status data when the observation time may be related to survival time. The correlation between observation time and survival time and the covariate effects are described by a copula model and the proportional hazards model, respectively. For estimation, a sieve maximum likelihood procedure with the use of monotone I-spline functions is proposed and the proposed method is examined through a simulation study and illustrated with a real data set. In the fourth part of this dissertation, we discuss the regression analysis of interval- censored data where the censoring mechanism could be related to the failure time. We consider a situation where the failure time depend on the censoring mechanism only through the length of the observed interval. The copula model and monotone I-splines are used and the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimates are established. In particular, the estimated regression parameters are shown to be semiparametrically efficient. An extensive simulation study and an illustrative example is provided. Finally, we will talk about the directions for future research. One topic related the fourth part of this dissertation for future research could be to allow the failure time to depend on both the lower and upper bounds of the observation interval. Another possible future research topic could be to consider a cure rate model for interval-censored data with informative censoring.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Multivariate Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Lianming Wang and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interval-censored failure time data commonly arise in clinical trials and medical studies. In such studies, the failure time of interest is often not exactly observed, but known to fall within some interval. For multivariate interval-censored data, each subject may experience multiple events, each of which is interval-censored. This thesis studies four research problems related to regression analysis and association study of multivariate interval-censored data. In particular, in Chapter 2, we propose a goodness-of-fit test for the marginal Cox model approach, which is the most commonly, used approach in multivariate regression analysis. Chapter 3 presents a two-stage estimation procedure for the association parameter for case 2 bivariate interval-censored data. In Chapter 4 we give a simple procedure to estimate the regression parameter for case 2 interval-censored data and Chapter 5 studies the efficient estimation of regression parameters and association parameter simultaneously for bivariate current status data. All the proposed methods are assessed by simulation studies and illustrated using real-life applications.
Download or read book Emerging Topics in Modeling Interval Censored Survival Data written by Jianguo Sun and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book primarily aims to discuss emerging topics in statistical methods and to booster research, education, and training to advance statistical modeling on interval-censored survival data. Commonly collected from public health and biomedical research, among other sources, interval-censored survival data can easily be mistaken for typical right-censored survival data, which can result in erroneous statistical inference due to the complexity of this type of data. The book invites a group of internationally leading researchers to systematically discuss and explore the historical development of the associated methods and their computational implementations, as well as emerging topics related to interval-censored data. It covers a variety of topics, including univariate interval-censored data, multivariate interval-censored data, clustered interval-censored data, competing risk interval-censored data, data with interval-censored covariates, interval-censored data from electric medical records, and misclassified interval-censored data. Researchers, students, and practitioners can directly make use of the state-of-the-art methods covered in the book to tackle their problems in research, education, training and consultation.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Panel Count Data written by Jianguo Sun and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Panel count data occur in studies that concern recurrent events, or event history studies, when study subjects are observed only at discrete time points. By recurrent events, we mean the event that can occur or happen multiple times or repeatedly. Examples of recurrent events include disease infections, hospitalizations in medical studies, warranty claims of automobiles or system break-downs in reliability studies. In fact, many other fields yield event history data too such as demographic studies, economic studies and social sciences. For the cases where the study subjects are observed continuously, the resulting data are usually referred to as recurrent event data. This book collects and unifies statistical models and methods that have been developed for analyzing panel count data. It provides the first comprehensive coverage of the topic. The main focus is on methodology, but for the benefit of the reader, the applications of the methods to real data are also discussed along with numerical calculations. There exists a great deal of literature on the analysis of recurrent event data. This book fills the void in the literature on the analysis of panel count data. This book provides an up-to-date reference for scientists who are conducting research on the analysis of panel count data. It will also be instructional for those who need to analyze panel count data to answer substantive research questions. In addition, it can be used as a text for a graduate course in statistics or biostatistics that assumes a basic knowledge of probability and statistics.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Interval censored and Truncated Survival Data written by Hee-Jeong Lim and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data from clinical trials and epidemiological studies are often incomplete due to interval censoring and truncation. In this thesis, we will discuss the statistical analysis of survival data with interval-censoring and truncation. First, we consider the problem of comparing two failure time distributions based on interval-censored data. We propose three classes of nonparametric test procedures, which include most existing methods as special cases. To evaluate and compare the proposed and existing tests and to draw a guideline for selecting an appropriate test for a given situation, an extensive simulation study is conducted. Secondly, we consider the problem of estimating a survival function when there exists a change point. To obtain the maximum likelihood estimator of a survival function in this case, an EM algorithm is developed when the survival function is completely unknown before the change point and known up to a vector of unknown parameters after the change point. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and illustrate it using a set of survival data arising from an AIDS study. Thirdly, we consider a regression analysis of survival data with interval-censored covariates. To estimate regression parameters, methods based on estimating equations are developed. An extensive simulation study is performed to evaluate the proposed method.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data with Missing Information written by Ping Chen and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Failure time data arise in many fields and can involve different types of censoring structures and missing information. We consider three cases: right-censored data with missing censoring indicators, clustered current status data, and clustered interval-censored data. Chapter 2 discusses regression analysis of right-censored failure time data with missing censoring indicators and presents an efficient estimation procedure based on the EM algorithm. The simulation study performed indicates that the proposed methodology performs well for practical situations. An illustrative example from a breast cancer clinical trial is provided. Chapter 3 discusses regression analysis of clustered current status data. For inference, a Cox frailty model and a two-step EM algorithm are presented. A simulation study was conducted for the evaluation of the proposed methodology and indicates that the approach performs well for practical situations. An illustrative example from a tumorigenicity experiment is provided. Chapter 4 generalizes the study of Chapter 3 to clustered interval-censored data. Chapter 5 discusses some directions for future research.
Download or read book The Nonparametric Analysis of Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Ran Duan and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By interval-censored failure time data, we mean that the failure time of interest is observed to belong to some windows or intervals, instead of being known exactly. One would get an interval-censored observation for a survival event if a subject has not experienced the event at one follow-up time but had experienced the event at the next follow-up time. Interval-censored data include right-censored data (Kalbfleisch and Prentice, 2002) as a special case. Nonparametric comparison of survival functions is one of the main tasks in failure time studies such as clinical trials. For interval-censored failure time data, a few nonparametric test procedures have been developed. However, due to the strict restrictions of existing nonparametric tests and practical demands, some new nonparametric tests need to be developed. This dissertation consists of four parts. In the first part, we propose a new class of test procedures whose asymptotic distributions are established under both null and alternative hypotheses, since all of the existing test procedures cannot be used if one intends to perform some power or sample size calculation under the alternative hypothesis. Some numerical results have been obtained from a simulation study for assessing the finite sample performance of the proposed test procedure. Also we applied the proposed method to a real data set arising from an AIDS clinical trial concerning the opportunistic infection cytomegalovirus (CMV). The second part of this dissertation will focus on the nonparametric test for intervalcensored data with unequal censoring. As we know, one common drawback or restriction of the nonparametric test procedures given in the literature is that they can only apply to situations where the observation processes follow the same distribution among different treatment groups. To remove the restriction, a test procedure is proposed, which takes into account the difference between the distributions of the censoring variables. Also the asymptotic distribution of the test statistics is developed by counting process and martingale theory. For the assessment of the performance of the procedure, a simulation study is conducted and suggested that it works well for practical situations. An illustrative example from a study aiming to investigate the HIV -1 infection risk among hemophilia patients is provided. The third part of this dissertation deals with the regression analysis of multivariate interval-censored data with informative censoring. Multivariate interval-censored failure time data often occur in the clinical trial that involves several related event times of interest and all the event times suffer interval censoring. Different types of models have been proposed for the regression analysis ( Zhang et al. (2008); Tong et al. (2008); Chen et al. (2009); Sun (2006)). However, most of these methods only deal with the situation where observation time is independent of the underlying survival time completely or given covariates. In this chapter, we discuss regression analysis of multivariate interval-censored data when the observation time may be related to the underlying survival time. An estimating equation based approach is proposed for regression coefficient estimate with the additive hazards frailty model and the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimates are established by using counting processes. A major advantage of the proposed method is that it does not involve estimation of any baseline hazard function. Simulation results suggest that the proposed method works well for practical situations. Finally, we will talk about the directions for future research. One is about the nonparametric test for interval-censored data with informative censoring. The other is about multiple generalized log-rank test for interval censored data.
Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Bivariate Interval censored Failure Time Data written by Qingning Zhou and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation deals with various issues in the statistical analysis of bivariate interval-censored failure time data, including regression analysis, model selection and estimation of the association between failure times. In particular, it includes three projects. The first project discusses regression analysis of bivariate current status data under the marginal proportional hazards model. For the problem, by using Bernstein polynomials and an unspecified copula model, we develop a sieve maximum likelihood estimation approach that applies to very general situations. In particular, it allows one to estimate the underlying copula model and can be easily implemented. The strong consistency, asymptotic normality and efficiency of the estimators of regression parameters are established. In the second project, we consider regression analysis of bivariate case II interval-censored data. For this problem, we present a class of semiparametric transformation models which is very flexible and in particular includes the commonly used proportional hazards model as a special case. Also, for inference, we develop a sieve maximum likelihood approach based on Bernstein polynomials. The strong consistency, asymptotic normality and efficiency of the resulting estimators of the regression parameters are established. In the third project, we consider the class of semiparametric copula-based models, in which multivariate survival functions are characterized by parametric copulas and nonparametric marginal survival functions. One important issue in applying this class of models to a given data set is how to choose an appropriate parametric copula. We propose two model selection procedures for Archimedean copulas with bivariate interval-censored data. The first procedure is based on a comparison of the nonparametric and model-based estimators of the probability integral transformation K, while the second procedure is based on a pseudo-likelihood function.
Download or read book Survival Analysis written by John P. Klein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making complex methods more accessible to applied researchers without an advanced mathematical background, the authors present the essence of new techniques available, as well as classical techniques, and apply them to data. Practical suggestions for implementing the various methods are set off in a series of practical notes at the end of each section, while technical details of the derivation of the techniques are sketched in the technical notes. This book will thus be useful for investigators who need to analyse censored or truncated life time data, and as a textbook for a graduate course in survival analysis, the only prerequisite being a standard course in statistical methodology.
Download or read book Flexible Imputation of Missing Data Second Edition written by Stef van Buuren and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Missing data pose challenges to real-life data analysis. Simple ad-hoc fixes, like deletion or mean imputation, only work under highly restrictive conditions, which are often not met in practice. Multiple imputation replaces each missing value by multiple plausible values. The variability between these replacements reflects our ignorance of the true (but missing) value. Each of the completed data set is then analyzed by standard methods, and the results are pooled to obtain unbiased estimates with correct confidence intervals. Multiple imputation is a general approach that also inspires novel solutions to old problems by reformulating the task at hand as a missing-data problem. This is the second edition of a popular book on multiple imputation, focused on explaining the application of methods through detailed worked examples using the MICE package as developed by the author. This new edition incorporates the recent developments in this fast-moving field. This class-tested book avoids mathematical and technical details as much as possible: formulas are accompanied by verbal statements that explain the formula in accessible terms. The book sharpens the reader’s intuition on how to think about missing data, and provides all the tools needed to execute a well-grounded quantitative analysis in the presence of missing data.
Download or read book Analysis of Interval Censored Failure Time Data with Long Term Survivors written by Kin-Yau Wong and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Analysis of Interval-censored Failure Time Data With Long-term Survivors" by Kin-yau, Wong, 黃堅祐, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Failure time data analysis, or survival analysis, is involved in various research fields, such as medicine and public health. One basic assumption in standard survival analysis is that every individual in the study population will eventually experience the event of interest. However, this assumption is usually violated in practice, for example when the variable of interest is the time to relapse of a curable disease resulting in the existence of long-term survivors. Also, presence of unobservable risk factors in the group of susceptible individuals may introduce heterogeneity to the population, which is not properly addressed in standard survival models. Moreover, the individuals in the population may be grouped in clusters, where there are associations among observations from a cluster. There are methodologies in the literature to address each of these problems, but there is yet no natural and satisfactory way to accommodate the coexistence of a non-susceptible group and the heterogeneity in the susceptible group under a univariate setting. Also, various kinds of associations among survival data with a cure are not properly accommodated. To address the above-mentioned problems, a class of models is introduced to model univariate and multivariate data with long-term survivors. A semiparametric cure model for univariate failure time data with long-term survivors is introduced. It accommodates a proportion of non-susceptible individuals and the heterogeneity in the susceptible group using a compound- Poisson distributed random effect term, which is commonly called a frailty. It is a frailty-Cox model which does not place any parametric assumption on the baseline hazard function. An estimation method using multiple imputation is proposed for right-censored data, and the method is naturally extended to accommodate interval-censored data. The univariate cure model is extended to a multivariate setting by introducing correlations among the compound- Poisson frailties for individuals from the same cluster. This multivariate cure model is similar to a shared frailty model where the degree of association among each pair of observations in a cluster is the same. The model is further extended to accommodate repeated measurements from a single individual leading to serially correlated observations. Similar estimation methods using multiple imputation are developed for the multivariate models. The univariate model is applied to a breast cancer data and the multivariate models are applied to the hypobaric decompression sickness data from National Aeronautics and Space Administration, although the methodologies are applicable to a wide range of data sets. DOI: 10.5353/th_b4819947 Subjects: Failure time data analysis Survival analysis (Biometry)
