The Identification of Potential Longitudinal Biomarkers and Measurements of Effectiveness for Biomarkers as Surrogates in Multivariate Survival Data

Abstract

A proposed method based on frailty models is used to identify longitudinal biomarkers or surrogates for a multivariate survival. This method is an extention of earlier models by Wulfsohn and Tsiatis (1997) and Song et al. (2002). In this article, similar to Henderson et al. (2002), a joint likelihood function combines the likelihood functions of the longitudinal biomarkers and the multivariate survival times. We use simulations to explore how the number of individuals, the number of time points per individual and the functional form of the random effects from the longitudianl biomarkers influence the power to detect the association of a longitudinal biomarker and the multivariate survival time. The proposed method is illustrate by using the gastric cancer data.

Keywords:

• Biomarker
• Joint likelihood
• Repeated measurements
• Surrogate

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification:

• Primary 62N03
• Secondary 62-07